


Into the Dust

by thekatcameback



Series: The Old Guard Daemons [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (offscreen) - Freeform, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Death, Dead kid, Established Relationship, Everybody Lives, F/F, Found Family, Happy Ending, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, M/M, Missions, Team as Family, Temporary Character Death, getting the gang back together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:07:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 53,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26501860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekatcameback/pseuds/thekatcameback
Summary: She tries to turn and look at him but Dizzy won’t let her move her head. It’s hard to breathe and she feels light headed and from the corner of her eye, she can see the edges of Chris’ wings start to blur. Her hand closes on itself, empty, and the room whites out.A blood red train. A man holding a flask to his fox daemon’s mouth. Two sleeping faces tucked close together, the swish of a tail that could be a sleeping predator. Swimming in and out of focus, the face of a woman with old eyes. Bubbles, streaming up at her face in the darkness.Nile and her daemon don't die, then gain a second family, then save the world. In that order.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache & Booker | Sebastien & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf & Nicky | Nicolò & Quynh, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: The Old Guard Daemons [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926766
Comments: 128
Kudos: 502





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redheartglow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redheartglow/gifts).



> 1.5 months and 50000 words later!!??
> 
> Sunday, July 26, redheartglow asked: "THE OLD GUARD: WHAT ARR THEIR DAEMONS." 
> 
> Together, we took the long way round in answering (by which I mean I typed but also yelled at her to make every decision along the way. Almost all of the jokes were shouted at each other.) The first third was produced in two days, and the following month featured me whining about the great indignity of writing while sporadically continuing to do the thing. This is the biggest fic I've ever written and it dazes and delights me. The process has been EXCELLENT and I would recommend it to anyone except that I'm greedy for her love and will keep it to myself.
> 
> So, thank you and this is our child.
> 
> Thank you to my nonfandom friend for the title, redheartglow and robi0688 for the support for my (once again, relentless, I'm lucky to have great friends and a cute face) whining, their feedback, encouragement and suggestions, and for the proofread. All remaining errors are my own.
> 
> Welcome to the prologue.

Nile stares upwards.

The hidden room had hardly been big enough for Christopher to spread his wings when they’d found the militant, but he’d managed to get airborn long enough to dive at the man’s bat daemon and crash them both to the ground at the same time as Nile fires twice, centre mass.

“I’ve got her, I’ve got her,” he shrills, voice in the same pitch as his car-alarm bird chirp. Nile pats the man down roughly, tries to press her hand to the wound in his stomach as he fights her.

“Dizzy, a little help please?” and a sharp line of pain.

Chris keens and tries to take off again, but Nile can see him lurching, dropping back to earth instead of clearing the building. Dizzy is calling for help, pressing her hands to Nile’s neck. She’s coming in and out of focus and Nile’s hand scrambles for Chris, missing him on the first two attempts before her shaking fingers close around one of his legs.

She tries to turn and look at him but Dizzy won’t let her move her head. It’s hard to breathe and she feels light headed and from the corner of her eye, she can see the edges of Chris’ wings start to blur. Her hand closes on itself, empty, and the room whites out.

A blood red train. A man holding a flask to his fox daemon’s mouth. Two sleeping faces tucked close together, the swish of a tail that could be a sleeping predator. Swimming in and out of focus, the face of a woman with old eyes. Bubbles, streaming up at her face in the darkness.

Nile sits up. She’s the only occupied bed in the tent. Christopher has been set gently on a perch just below the IV stand. He looks fine, but Nile reaches slowly out, lifts him up and into her arms and feels across him.

“I thought we were going to die,” Chris says quietly. They look in unison to the doctor and her hare daemon working at the desk. “I thought you were letting me go.”

“We’re not done here,” Nile whispers. “We’re going to be just fine.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nile and Christopher choose to save the other immortals, with all the repercussions and banter their actions entail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like every academic everywhere, I have failed to track my sources. Thus, I know that many elements of this chapter have been inspired by the amazing tumblr meta (I'm thinking in particular of Joe being the worst at guns), but I can't thank individuals. So if you recognize something, THANK YOU. YOU MADE MY PERSONAL WORLD A BETTER PLACE.
> 
> Additionally, I've finally broken it up into chapters so now both you dear readers and I know what to expect. Thank you to redheartglow today for reminding me to decide how to spell the daemon's names.

Somewhere between Andy’s permission to leave and Nile’s choice to return is an uncomfortable realization about herself, waiting to happen. Her mom taught her there were all kinds of warriors, that it would be enough to help where she could. But Nile had seen the way Andy held Booker, the absolute trust that where she went, he would follow. Andy has no fucking idea what she’s sent Nile away from.

Nile finds Copley on the floor, hunched around his cat daemon and scrambling for a weapon at the sight of her. There’s blood on the floor and she can make use of Copley’s remorse, so she does. And she’s not alone when she goes for the others. Chris, delicately perched on her shoulder to block the muzzle of the gun behind her back, chirps as they leave the elevator.

The men obviously don’t see it coming, aren’t even thorough in disarming her, because Nile wakes with her weapon in her hand. Their unease turns to panic when Chris blinks back into existence, already diving towards the face of a man with his talons outstretched. For a moment, Nile thinks of Dizzy and Jay and the packed bags on her bunk.

Chris, manoeuvring carefully in the narrow hallways and bursting with speed through the office and lab spaces, calls, “At least this time we die with A/C.”

Nile is running too fast to laugh, her momentum pitching her forwards when she’s shot from behind. More usefully, he chirps, “Your six, your six.”

She fires two shots behind her as she staggers through the door and does a rapid body count. Nicky and Joe, shirtless with blood dried across their torsos, Booker slumped to the far left, Andy—bleeding. Chris splits away, unsteady but determined, and sinks his talons into the rat daemon at the lab table. The woman with her syringe staggers and gasps in pain, clutching at her side and Nile floors her with a punch.

“You made a promise,” she says and Andy’s jaw goes hard.

Nile struggles to keep an eye on the door as Andy unfastens Nicky’s arm, scolding Joe into silence low and relentless. The daemons, Nile realizes, are in fine mesh cages against the wall, the lioness crammed in tight in a too-small container and the wolf snarling and banging against the wall. Zipphora the lioness and Miriam the wolf, Nile thinks but can’t tell which belongs to which man because Andy had introduced them as, “Nicky and Joe, Zipphora and Miriam” with the couples matched the wrong way around.

Nicky stumbles to them before putting on the shirt bunched up on a chair near him, undoes the clasp first on Miriam and pats her down carefully before she springs over, knocking into Joe as he struggles back into his tattered shirt. Nicky puts the same care into Zipphora, smoothing his fingers over the indentations on her cheek and pressing their foreheads together before rising. Nile has never seen someone touch another person’s daemon before, not even between her parents and she knows how much they loved each other.

“Let’s get this motherfucker,” Andy announces for them, pushing through to the lead and shoving the door open to be first through.

Nile has fought in a team, but not like this. Having a wolf as ground support is a little overwhelming if helpful: Miriam draws looks and shots from the panicking security team, but also sinks her teeth into hamstrings to offer up a slow-falling target for Nile to finish. Booker’s fox Baudelaire zags through the crowd and Nile sees another trip, falling hard and wailing as Zipphora snaps her jaws closed around his terrier daemon.

Chris flickers a few times when shots punch through Nile’s back, but he’s whole and chattering successfully into her ear as she leans against the mirrored wall with Andy.

Merrick’s daemon is horrible, a lizard with its tail too short and regrown sideways. It wails in a high pitched voice when Andy sinks the labrys into his shoulder, skittering around to the other side as Merrick raises a slow arm. Nile has played rugby, once or twice.

“Oh, shit.”

Christopher is the first thing she sees when her ribs, legs, fingers crack back into place.

“Nile?” is Nicky, using the same concerned voice from her first night. It feels like a hundred years ago, Nile thinks. What’ll happen when she’s actually as old as he is. “She’s okay.”

“You flew,” Christopher announces, hopping from foot to foot. He launches into the air when they pull the car door open, fluttering while Booker hauls her up and secures her arm around his shoulder. As soon as she’s got both feet under her, Chris is landing on her free shoulder, talons biting through the already shredded jacket. “You flew, and you were terrible at it.”

“Ow,” Nile repeats absently. Her legs grow steadier and she can bear his weight and lift the labrys by the time Andy is in front of her, smiling.

“Copley said he’d hold onto your horse ‘til you got back,” Nile mutters as Andy squeezes her neck, wraps an arm around her back. She has questions. Big questions, lots of questions that deserve more specific answers than that damn airplane.

“Let’s go,” Andy says calmly. Booker opens the back hatch as she walks around past him, watching the bumper jolt and settle as first the lioness, then the wolf daemon climb in. Baudelaire stays draped around his neck and Nile keeps Chris in her lap as Andy cuts the wheel sharply and they pull away from Merrick’s building.

Nile combs her fingers through Chris’ feathers until his pinions are neat and straight against her thigh. The silence in the truck is heavy. Next to her, Nicky shifts a long leg up to prop against the console, tilts his head back slowly and sighs. Booker is silent on his other side, but Nile can see the twitches of his fingers as he rhythmically pets Baudelaire. She yawns and then squints her focus, but the world blurs gently together and she falls asleep.

Voices wake her and she’s alone in the car. She rubs the sleep out of her eyes, follows the sound until she can find the immortals in a tight circle several feet away. Andy has her arms crossed and looks inflexible and irritated, her eyes bouncing through the group.

Joe seems to be doing the most talking. As Nile zones in on the words, she catches, “Fuck him, and fuck that creepy lizard, and fuck,” with a sharp accusatory finger jabbed into Booker’s chest, “Fuck you most of all.”

“Joe,” Andy says. She looks at Nicky for help and Nile sees him hunch up his shoulders, face flattened of the range of emotions Nile has already grown to expect from him. Andy turns from him too, speaks towards Booker with a message for the three men. “We have time to decide. We don’t stop until we’re done here.”

“Come on,” Nicky says, takes Joe’s elbow and leads him away from Andy and Booker. Their daemons mirror them, the lioness’ tail flicking with rapid agitation and the wolf’s hackles raised along her back. Even angry, they stop in sight of the car, shoulders turned away as a visible snub to Booker but sightlines possible.

Booker rubs his face and then returns to the truck like the weight of the world is on his shoulders. He looks her up and down, ending on the tightness of her grip on Chris. “You’re awake. Sorry you had to hear—“

“Hey,” she says briskly. “How about I take the middle seat.”

Booker looks desperately grateful, shifting to give her as much room as he can as she rebuckles. They look out the windshield together, watch the inaudible tense conversation between Nicky and Joe and the way the lioness stalks back and forth between them and the road. They must reach a conclusion, maybe even a consensus, because Nicky turns away from Joe for the first time and catches her staring.

Joe is a few steps behind when they make their way back to the truck. The wolf darts under his hand so that he’s resting his fingers against the arc of her skull. Nile watches him watch Nicky until they’re back in the car, when Joe takes shotgun again and turns the music up uncomfortably loud to prevent conversation.

\--

Nile thinks she’s doing a pretty good job of limiting her questions to a reasonable amount as they drive away, leaving Booker and Baudelaire behind the pub. Starting with, “What the fuck,” and hitting a second wind on “How exactly is this helping,” with a detour through “So, are you literally a witch, Andy.”

Copley’s whiteboards don’t help Nile answer any questions, but they do provoke responses in the older immortals. Nile sees Andy track the information in front of her and absorb it in. Nicky is carefully tracing a red line through the Cuban revolution, close to the board where Joe has pulled back to survey the whole.

Copley has a hand rested on his desk near his cat daemon. She hasn’t looked up except to stretch her legs luxuriously one at a time and recurl in the other direction when they’d entered. When Andy says he’s going to help them, the cat blinks, squints open one eye and purrs.

“I’d be honoured,” Copley says, adding another mark to her mental tally about his trustworthiness. He knows when to step back and when to say yes, and Nile knows he’ll spend the years of sleepless nights to help in the way he thought he had when he’d turned them over to Merrick. Sometimes penance can be a good thing.

She’s found herself at Andy’s right shoulder, parallel to Joe and with Nicky on Andy’s six. The lioness yawns, all teeth, and the horse stamps a foot heroically. Nile understood the pattern when Copley showed it to her, and now she thinks she can see the shape of the future coming into focus.

The cat daemon cracks an eye open from her perch and adds, “You make a very purr-suasive argument.”

The tension breaks as Nile double takes on the cat, who blandly continues. “Meow I think it’s pawsibly time for you to lie low for a few weeks while Copley handles things.”

“Your daemon calls you ‘Copley’?” Joe says incredulously.

“Did he just say—“ Nile gapes at Copley. He shrugs.

“Would you like me to book you a car, or will you be fine on your own.” Copley steps to the side, leaving the path to the door open. Andy shoots him the narrowest smile when she walks past him.

“I think meow would be a good time to start putting together some purr-manent transportation resources,” the daemon is saying as they walk past.

Nile waits until they’re back on the continent and heading north towards Denmark before she breaks the silence. “Did his daemon. Speak exclusively in puns?”

Joe snaps and points a finger at Nicky. “Puns, I knew that was the word.”

“You said Punic, my heart. As in Carthage, and the war,” Nicky replies dismissively. They’ve let Nile sit in the front so that their daemons can sit in the back between them rather than the trunk. “Nile said _puns_ , as in...”

“A series of very punny jokes,” Chris offers. Nile groans and leans her head back. He hops excitedly from one of her knees to the other. “Like how when Copley goes to sleep he probably goes.... undercover. Or if Zipphora said she didn’t love Miriam, she’d be.... lion.”

“Please,” Nile whispers. “Please, sweet baby Jesus above us.”

“I bet his daemon is named _Catley_ ,” Chris crows. “Copley and Catley, off on another wire tapping adventure.”

Apparently crusading animals also appreciate puns, because there’s a (very nearly literal) roar of laughter from the back seat.

“I do not control him,” Nile says seriously to Andy. “He’s his own bird.”

Andy smiles fondly at the road ahead. “Yes, his jokes are so bad they should be ill-eagle.”

Nile refuses to speak to anyone else until they pull up to the cottage outside of Helsinger. The first night, she doesn’t sleep at all because every time she closes her eyes there’s a rapid fire death toll, or Andy’s bloody shirt, or the new-and-unpleasant smell of old brains that took Nicky two hours to scrub away. The second night she’s so tired that she doesn’t have a choice in the matter at first, every time she closes her eyes the clock skips forward even though she wakes feeling as skin-sore as she has ever since her first death.

Andy is curled silently, one arm as a pillow, to her left. Her free hand is rested over the bullet hole, testing or protecting it instinctively. When Nile shifts to face the door she catches sight of Nicky sprawled face down on the bed, one of the daemons using the small of his back as a pillow. Joe is nowhere to be seen.

Nile eases herself out of bed, leaving Chris perched in a huddle of feathers on the headboard, and makes her way carefully out of the bedroom. There’s a light on over the kitchen table, and Joe doesn’t look up from his stacks of papers when she pauses behind him. Nile gets herself a glass of water before she sits next to him, scans the lines of numbers and the website for singing telegrams on the laptop.

“Can’t sleep?” she asks quietly.

Joe gives her a strained smile, gestures widely. “I feel as though there are some unfinished activities in my life.”

Nile feels like her whole existence is unfinished activities right now. She slides a page closer to her, reads down an alphabetized list of weapons. “Is this a price list?”

“Invoice,” he says absently, jotting down another line on a different piece of paper. “A successful but improperly described mission, just before we met you. The start of Booker and Mr. Copley’s betrayal.”

She pulls another sheet free. This one has “emotional damages” at the top, crossed out once and then written again. The numbers are in British pounds and exorbitantly high. She taps her fingers on the bottom line, which has been circled twice. “Andy said you guys are an army. Of four, but still.”

“Armies require regular pay to ensure compliance,” he says mildly. “Also, Andy doesn’t like to admit to her own idealism. In this century, it’s better to think of us as hired guns, a profession which requires detailed accounting and an invoice. Nicky would do it for free, Andy doesn’t care about the details, and Booker—“ he freezes, then pushes on, “never remembered to haggle. So I keep our records.”

The nearest stack of bundled receipts appears to be exclusively for a range of nondescript t-shirts and tank tops in neutral shades. There is also an entire helicopter rental. Nile tries to imagine the scene; it makes sense that they weren’t just sitting and waiting for a new immortal—Andy had made it abundantly clear what a surprise Nile had been. But her brief time with the team has featured a lot of murder, sleeping in decrepit abandoned buildings, and soaking Copley’s car with blood until the upholstery is unsalvageable. She hasn’t worked nearly far enough down the list to consider the financial implications of her new lifestyle.

Joe gently takes the sheet back from her, checks it against another. His face is mild and unaffected when he adds, “My normal process is complicated by the fact that I’m unaware of the going rates for set-up, betrayal, and illegal human testing. We normally charge only for physical requirements of the work.”

“I’m not sure there’s any amount of money that can get it all back,” she mutters. He smiles at her again, but this time she can see the depth of the bags under his eyes. She’s not sure she’s seen Joe sleep at all since they got to the new place, but she doesn’t know him well enough to say _that_ too.

“All the same, it helps a bit to fantasize about it,” he says, shrugs expansively. “Five hundred pounds for making us think those girls were dead, three hundred for each for the lumbar punctures, seven thousand for the time it took Andy to accept that gun from you. Mr. Copley is not a poor man, and sometimes people like that respond well to a reminder that there is a financial cost as well as the damage done to one’s soul.”

“And that?” she asks, pointing to the singing telegram website.

There’s a hint of the playfulness from their first introduction in Joe’s eyes when he shrugs again. “After a few centuries, Nile, you will truly come to appreciate the ways in which you can make your displeasure known without touching a single weapon.”

“It’ll be interesting to see how he reacts when we’re not threatening him,” she says tentatively. He snaps and points a finger gun at her, then dips his head down and returns to his work. “Still, Joe—You should sleep.”

He hums absently. “I’ll be right behind you, Nile. Get some rest.”

He hasn’t returned by the time she drifts off again, this time for good. But in the morning, she can see the tufts of his curls just barely visible from where he’s pressed limpet-close to Nicky’s back. On the kitchen table next to a fresh loaf of bread, there’s a printed invoice to Mr. James Copley. From what Nile can tell, it’s official as hell. Joe has added the cost of the singing telegram to the section on miscellaneous expenses.

Knowing that the others are having a hard time too is somehow comforting. It’s not like they don’t have good reasons for it, but every reminder of the humanity that they’ve tenaciously maintained gives Nile hope that she’s going to survive this experience with the important pieces of her intact. 

After a week of almost-decent nights, she wakes up to a horse in the kitchen. It’s not the setup to an elaborate joke, she just finds herself weaving around a horse’s back end and Nicky with a heaping plate of breakfast sausages before she can take a seat at the table and rest her head in her hands.

“Sleep okay?” Nicky asks sympathetically. They have, of course, made omelettes. Andy has already finished two thirds of hers and grunts a greeting through a mouthful.

Joe ducks into view under the horse’s neck with a platter of toast. The horse (a horse, inside. What is her life) swoops its head down and snorts loudly over his shoulder as it reaches for the bread.

“No toast for you, Party horse,” Joe says as he holds the plate further away from them both. “Andy says you’re getting fat.”

“Party horse,” Nile laughs. “I have _got_ to hear this story.”

“No story,” Joe says cheerfully, dropping two pieces onto her plate. “His name is Party horse. And jam is just on the table.”

“His name,” Andy says darkly, “is Partitavus. And horses aren’t supposed to have beer guts.”

“That’s what you said, in Afghanistan? Andromache of Sythia and Parti—“

“Partitavus,” Andy repeats firmly.

“Party horse,” Joe mouths to her and grins as he goes past. Party takes advantage of his distraction to lip a piece of toast off the plate and tosses his head when Joe mock-gasps in betrayal.

“It’s whole wheat,” he says around the crust. “It’s like eating celery, it doesn’t count. I saw it on Doctor Oz.”

“Uh, that doesn’t sound true,” Nile says.

She shouldn’t be surprised that the horse speaks directly to her, it seems like the teamwork is between humans and daemons rather than three humans with their sides. Party flips his mane again. “I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. Hey, marmalade! Can you spread some on a piece for me?”

It is a miracle, Nile thinks, that this was the first time someone had captured the team if a daemon is using Doctor Oz for medical advice. Then, she thinks of hundreds of lifetimes where Andy never had to worry about how she’d move from place to place, a daemon only made less useful by the shrinking modern world. Nicky, as if he senses what she’s thinking, hands her a stack of weathered books on the subject of daemon forms and historical themes.

He shrugs when she raises her brows, offers, “Sometimes it is interesting to see where people think you came from.”

Since Nile has not spent a lot of time thinking about daemons through history, the books open her up to think harder about her new companions. Booker had a fox who seemed to spend most of her time either napping or explicitly playing dead. He’d hand-fed Baudelaire during their dinner and she shared his flask. When she’d fought, she’d been quick and single-minded, a tripping hazard and a direct threat. Nile thinks a fox would have been good in Napoleon’s army—closer to the dogs many of her fellow soldiers had settled with, but different enough to reflect the way Booker sits just apart from a group.

Nicky and Joe have matching alpha predators. Nile has grown more used to the comfortable way the men touch each other’s daemons. Part of it seems like just the group dynamic—though none of them have reached for Chris yet, she’d seen Booker nap against Party’s side in the French cave when she’d awoken at dawn, and both the wolf and lion bracket Andy on their first stop after leaving Merrick’s when her exhaustion had finally won out over wariness. But Joe and Nicky seem to spend so much time within each other’s sight, and the wolf and lion spend so many hours napping in front of the fire, that it takes time to decide who belongs to whom. The daemons names don’t help, Miriam and Zipphora both sound foreign to Nile and neither is immediately recognizable as Arabic or Italian.

Nile pays close attention when Joe has pronounced Nicky’s accent too obvious and vetoed Nile and Andy exposing themselves; he’s taken on the shopping for the team. He grabs his jacket, pats down his pockets for keys, and calls, “Let’s go, Miri.”

The wolf shakes herself awake and sits neatly in the shotgun seat like a dog when Joe uses the car. Miriam also rises when Joe seems restless about the past weeks, leading him out to “go for a walk” often enough that Nile can pick out the faint trail of the perimeter after a few days.

The only move Zipphora makes when Joe and Miriam are gone is a slow, stretching roll that turns her from one side to the other. Nicky also never looks up from his book, even if sometimes he’ll lean an arm out to trail his fingers along Miriam’s retreating spine. Nile has seen _the Lion King_ , she knows that female lions are the hunters and that they nap in prides for hours a day between kills. She’s seen Nicky in motion, blood across his cheeks and down the back of his shirt, but he also seems better at resting than either Andy or Joe.

“I didn’t know there were lions in Italy,” she says over dinner one night to test the theory. Joe and Nicky share an inscrutable look before Joe returns to his salad.

Nicky keeps his fond look when he meets her eyes. “Oh, Zipphora was not the first lion I’d seen. Genoa was a trading hub, even before I left to the Crusades. I also knew camels and monkeys, things like this.”

If lions were an option in medieval Italy, Nile figures that she’s solved the mystery, neatly parsed and placed the daemons without doing anything as direct and asking. Then, Nicky stretches after dinner when the football comes on and turns to her.

“Want to go find dessert? These two can be insufferable during sport.” Joe glances over and grins, Andy flips the bird without turning away from the screen. Nile grabs her coat and looks towards the usual carnivore pile, expecting to see Zipphora untangling herself from Miriam’s draped form. Instead, Miriam hops to her feet and heads towards the door.

“What’s going on here?” Chris squawks, accurate for once in reflecting her response to a situation. Six sets of eyes turn on her and Nicky tilts his head questioningly.

“Can you all separate from your daemons, like Andy?” she asks him accusingly. “Can Chris and I do that now?”

“Ah,” Nicky sighs, opens the door. “Come on, I’ll explain.”

They’re halfway down the road before he smiles at her. “I’m sorry, Nile, I sometimes forget which things you can decide for yourself and which things could be explained. Zipphora and Miriam are our daemons.”

“Like, shared,” Nile responds incredulously. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“I suppose once they must have been separate, as we were.” Nile doesn’t think Nicky’s aware of the instinctive way he clenches his hand in Miri’s fir, or the way she sways her gait to press gently against his leg. “I certainly remember nothing that could have marked me as—an abomination, when I left my home. And Joe, he was very well liked among his men, he must have also looked as expected before we met.”

“And then, destiny,” Nile finishes dryly. When Andy can’t answer a question, she says it doesn’t matter. Joe shrugs and smiles. Nicky always says it’s destiny.

He grins openly and unapologetically at her now. “Destiny, yes. I can never doubt that Joe is the other half of my heart, my soul. The evidence is here, in the way I never feel the pain of separation as long as one of the two is with me. Miriam and Zipphora are both of us, equally.”

"Then why—I thought, because Joe always took Miriam out.”

Miriam lets out a chuff and Nicky laughs. “That? That’s because Zipphora is very lazy. If there’s no need for all of us, we know Miriam at least will not whine if an errand takes more than five minutes.”

As an explanation for the moment, it makes perfect sense. But in the context of their wider lives, Nile still wonders. It must be possible to figure out who belonged to who first, it’s just another one of the questions that the other immortals find uninteresting. And she has time for a puzzle, since no one seems interested in moving on and she had found Copley’s number muted on the only cell phone in the house.

Andy shakes her awake abruptly before dawn. Nile hasn’t gotten around to sleeping armed yet, though she’s trying to get in the habit of being as perpetually armed as the other three. Nicky wakes and reaches for a weapon instinctively, but it makes Nile feel more like he’s used to feeling unsafe than having trained for training’s sake. She’s lost her family and her career in the space of a week, practically speaking, and she’s not ready to sacrifice the belief in a comfortable sleep before it becomes necessary.

If she hadn’t been armed, she might have stabbed Andy. So, really, her lack of preparedness is a gift to Andy’s mortality and the laundry both. Instead, she takes a half-hearted swing and misses.

“The birds aren’t even out,” she croaks. Chris, representing birdkind with enough sense to sleep through the final hours of the night, doesn’t move from his nearby perch.

“Come on, kid.” There’s a flicker of gentleness in Andy’s eyes. “I don’t want to have to flip you off the mattress. It’s time to see what you can do.”

“You were literally stabbed, I’m not going to fight you.”

Andy smirks slowly.

When Nile has changed into yoga pants and a sports bra, Andy leads her outside like she’s got a delightful surprise. Nile isn’t fully shocked when the surprise turns out to be Nicky and Joe, barely lit by the lights from the kitchen window. Joe is walking in slow circles, swinging his arms to loosen up. Nicky is flat on his back on the ground, eyes resolutely closed.

“No,” Nile says very carefully. “No offense, thank you, but no.”

“We just want to see what you can do,” Joe says cheerfully. “It took me four days to convince Andy to sit this one out for her stitches, Nile. Won’t you do us a favour?”

Nile has already realized that Joe’s puppy eyes are at least as lethal as his biceps. She folds her arms to stand her ground.

Nicky, from his prone position, adds, “At least this way you see us coming. Andy stabbed me three times when we were getting to know each other.”

Joe winks at her. “You have to remember that coffee was not a beverage until the fifteenth century. Nicky used to be up at every cricket chirp through the night, which made him particularly slow in the morning.”

“I had you to protect me,” Nicky counters with a lazy smile. “Sleep like the dead, wake with the dawn.”

Nile does not say that it sounds romantic as hell. She gets the feeling they already know. Andy drops herself down next to Nicky with a barely visible wince, hand twitching towards her side but not making contact. Joe stalks closer to Nile, hands curled loosely at his sides.

She’s already chosen to be with them. This is the next step. Nile shrugs and brings her arms up in front of her, closer to fists than Joe’s. She’s almost certain that he lets her take the first swing, but she doesn’t miss the opportunity. Her sharp jab hits him in the face and she feels cartilage shift under her knuckles as he stumbles back a step or two. Instead of reacting like a normal human, Joe laughs delightedly. From behind him, Andy claps and Nicky cheers loudly.

He’s on her before his nose has clicked back into place, which gives her an upsettingly intimate look at how noses heal. Nile keeps herself loose but Joe is surprisingly quick and limber, willing to take a punch to land two. He also seems to have a running tally of the places that hurt the most to hit and works her over methodically whenever she lets him in too close. It’s different to the way he’s acted with a gun, in the brief moments she’d observed him through Merrick’s hallways. Nile knows she’s holding her own, probably with points taken off because she doesn’t have a vested interest in trying to kill him like she’d wanted with Andy.

Joe taps out and Nicky rotates in seamlessly, and suddenly the techniques that had been working seem useless. Where Joe stayed in motion, Nicky plants himself, weight spread evenly. When Joe would take the hit, Nicky deflects her comfortably. He chooses his moments in a way where she can see where he’ll hit a moment before it happens when her own guard slips or she misplaces a foot. She’s being measured and even if he doesn’t find her wanting—

“Oh, do that again, I like that,” Nicky says brightly when she modifies a grip she’d seen Andy use. Just as abruptly as it began, they’re not sparring. He’s at her side, curling his shoulders and adjusting her feet to match her posture. He gestures Joe over for them to practice on and she walks him through it, watches him master the move and then repeat it several times on Joe using increasing force. Joe cracks after the twentieth hit, grabs Nicky into a loose headlock that neither try to wriggle out from.

Nile turns to Andy, breathing hard. “Well?”

“Not bad.” Andy’s face is still relaxed from her original laughter as she comes over to noogie Nicky’s captive head and retreats to walk a slow circle around the three of them. “It’s always good to be comfortable in close. We can start with that.”

It turns out that Andy’s idea of hand-to-hand as a starting point is followed by a series of increasingly esoteric tests on Nile’s skills. She flat out fails the foraging exam, though at least she’s aware of her lack of abilities and doesn’t die by poison mushroom. The guns go more easily because she’s already confident in that field. It’s safer not to think where someone like Andy would get one of those shooting machines that white Republicans have, but there is something pretty exciting about being able to hit a target and not kill it.

The other nice thing about the gun sessions is that it turns out she’s significantly better than Joe. He hits the targets but seems to never count his shots, makes bored faces when Nicky is explaining his sniper rifle to Nile and, when Andy insists they do another shooting competition, lays dramatically face down on the ground.

“You’re almost a thousand years old and you do this?” Nile asks incredulously. Joe tilts his head to grin at her, winks.

“Joe has never had the patience for ranged weapons,” Nicky sighs. “Though the situation is much better than the first rifles! The number of times he blew up a hand because he failed to properly load one of those finicky things, or didn’t think of the safety.” His voice goes into the dramatic and teasing. “He’s killed more men with the butt of a rifle than its barrel.”

“Slander and betrayal from my own heart, the very fire which warms me in the longest days of winter!” Joe protests from the ground.

“It seems like—being mediocre with guns is a pretty big oversight for a mercenary,” Nile says cautiously. She can hear all of the daemons sniggering behind her, but she’s not quite sure where the joke is. Joe is probably better than ninety percent of the people they’d face, but it seems like this team is pretty big on expertise over competence.

“Oh, no, Joe does not need a rifle,” Nicky says with overwhelming fondness.

The next morning, Nile is treated to a table of honest-to-God swords. Nicky has his hands on one that looks lifted straight out of Game of Thrones, Joe is flipping and catching a curved sword and making it look stupidly easy.

“Of course, you’re knights,” Nile groans. “You suck at swords because you’re older than any existing legal treatise in the modern world.”

“I was actually a merchant,” Joe starts in a lecturing tone completely at odds with the joy on his face. Nicky takes a swing at him, telegraphing the move for Nile’s sake and smiling himself when Joe ducks and brings his sword up. “But you aren’t wrong, I never outgrew the intimacy of a duel.”

“Foreplay,” Andy says. Nile looks over to see her methodically sharpening her labrys. “I’ll let you decide when they stop, because if we leave them to it we’re going to have to find our own safe house for the night.”

Nile had been impressed with other skills. Maybe it’s just that she’s never seen someone seriously sword fight. The Game of Thrones comparison doesn’t hold up long because Nicky is way better than Jon Snow and Joe seems to have no parallel style in medieval movies at all. Then Andy cuts in, kicking the back of Joe’s knee hard and driving the point at the head of her labrys straight at Nicky’s chest until he rolls to the left and out of the way. Nile adjusts her initial opinion, and decides that she’s impressed and potentially aroused by edged weapons and that her fantasy life has until this moment been a desolate space.

There’s no point waiting for a stoppage, the three of them shift in patterns, teaming up and splitting to a free for all. Nicky and Joe slightly more likely to work together but Joe is always prepared to give Andy a knee up for an insane jump move. Nile just clears her throat loudly, hands on her hips, and waits until they wind themselves down to look at her.

“It’s not as strange as it seems,” Nicky says at last. His shirt is sticking to his chest and back but the high flush on his cheeks speaks more to delight than exertion. “Guns are a very useful tool, but they require a degree of space and resources which are not always practical in a battle.”

“And it can be really fun to stab people who deserve it,” Andy drawls, setting her labrys down like a staff and looping a hand through the gaps in the blades to lean on it. “

Nile gives them a second, takes in the three distinct weapons that they hold like extensions of their limbs. Then she gives in and stops forcing her face to the stern expression she’s been holding as if she’d been ready to scold them, grins widely instead.

“Yeah, I definitely want a sword.”

\--

The bullet misses Nile by inches, so close she thinks it could part her hair. She pushes her shoulder up in a familiar motion to launch Christopher free, letting him spiral up just in time. The second bullet does hit the shoulder he’d just vacated, spinning her to the side.

Chris shrieks, “Ambush, ambush.” Zipphora and Miriam are past her within the space of a breath, launching up together to haul a man out from cover and shred him between them. Chris always starts panicked in battle before he can level himself, but he’s gaining his head faster and faster. A ruffle of feathers above her, and he adds, “Four men to your eleven—oh, ouch, three thanks to Zipphora. Ten circling back around the building to Andy’s four. And they have shrapnel bombs—“

Nile sees it sail past her before Chris can finish his sentence. She swears loudly, there are _children_ they need to protect, who the fuck are these guys?

“Got it, get the kids out,” Joe calls. There’s a muffled whump and a pained noise that Nile can recognize as Nicky. Nile doesn’t want to look back to see what’s happened, but suddenly she doesn’t have to—the daemons in front of her are flickering like a bad TV screen and their forward momentum has frozen. Nile crashes past them into the second man, body checking him and double tapping the third.

“Split right, Nicky,” Andy states. Her voice is calm and cuts through the noise. Nile knows from past ops that Andy is talking for her sake, catching her up to the team’s patterns. The children, eerily silent since they’d blown down the door to them, are audible as shuffling feet that “Get them out.”

“Joe,” Nicky says once. Joe doesn’t answer.

Nile grapples the fourth man, grunting as he shoots through her thigh before she can smash his forehead into his. Andy’s pistol fires rapidly behind her; there are two cracks from Nicky’s rifle. Her ears are straining for the shotgun, but Joe has frustrated her in training before by dropping his gun sooner than she’d prefer in sake of his sword. He could be fine. He could just be busy.

Nile can do the math as she grapples for her opponent’s gun. Fourteen combatants minus one early from the daemons and one from her, two down from Nicky’s shot—no sense in doubting if he’d hit—and Andy must have taken out at least three herself by now, so if Nile just clears _her_ last two she can pivot and provide support— 

Chris dives for the third’s dog daemon, lifts it hissing and spitting until the woman stumbles to her knees, clutching her chest and screaming at the separation. Nile wrenches the fourth’s gun to shoot his colleague, smashes her head against his again and remembers she has a knife up her own damn sleeve, now. She’s practiced the move so many times it feels like breathing once she has the hilt in her palm, down to the stomach and up through the left seam, angled in to avoid the ribs and twisting toward the heart.

“Clear,” she shouts as she turns, keeping the fourth’s gun and hauling it up to sight along the barrel. Andy’s opponents are falling back in the face of her terrifying axe. Nile shoots and misses one because they fall backward and she counts again, four up front and seven bodies here—and then she recognizes the only fallen form in the middle, keeps her muzzle up but runs forward and slides down to her knees.

Joe isn’t moving yet, face down and hat knocked sideways. At least they don’t have to think of stabilizing the spine, Nile thinks as she swallows bile. Her hand sinks into the mincemeat of Joe’s chest as she pivots him up and over. She checks pointlessly for a pulse.

“Andy, we need to move,” she says and feels outside her body when she hears how level her tone is.

Andy spins within the arc of her labrys. She evaluates instantly and jerks her head at her daemon as her follow-through slices another man. “Get him up on Partitavus.”

Deadlifts, Nile thinks as she moves herself into a squat, hauling Joe’s body towards her and up. Party lowers his head and she slings Joe over, grimacing at the weight and at the unwanted slip of intestines near her face. She’s seen worse, she thinks desperately. Booker had looked at least this bad, this will not destroy her love of Old El Paso, Joe is going to be fine.

“Move out,” Andy snaps, backing up next to her and slapping Party’s rump. Nile scrambles a pistol free from Joe’s leg as he goes past, swings her gun sharply across her field of vision to cover Andy. With a degree of common sense that’s both surprising and a relief, the remaining combatants have retreated. Nile doesn’t stumble directly into Party’s butt as she backs out of the compound, but she also doesn’t stop until she’s firm against it.

Chris lands with a clatter on the roof edge of their truck, announces, “Clear, clear clear.”

Nile sucks in a breath and lowers her gun. She turns to do another count on the children, all clutching mice or bird daemons to their chests with tears running down their faces. And then she scans the area again.

“Where are Zipphora and Miriam?” she asks, directing the question to the group at large. Nicky emerges from around the truck, daemonless and with bags under his eyes that she hadn’t noticed on the way into the compound. He doesn’t seem to see her when he walks up to her side, claps an arm around Party’s neck quickly.

“Ah, amore mio,” he murmurs, reaches up carefully to dislodge Joe and ease him into a bridal carry.

Nile feels a surge of panic. If she’d ever expected immortality to lessen her fear of death, the last few years have taught her unpleasantly otherwise. Her voice cracks when she asks again, “Where is Zipphora or Miriam?”

“Sometimes being in love isn’t just about looking cute,” Andy says flatly. She’s hauling the ramp into place so Party can join the children in the back. The disgust and fear are immediate and overwhelming. Nile turns away from the group and vomits, hunched over with her hands on her knees until Chris flutters down to press his familiar weight on her shoulder. When she straightens, Andy looks sympathetic but uncompromising. “Let’s move out, before these assholes decide they want another round.”

Nicky has Joe on his lap in the wide front bench seat and doesn’t move as the women climb in either side to bracket him. Nile sits in stunned silence for the first few miles, staring straight ahead as Andy guns the truck over uneven paths. She clenches her eyes shut for a moment, then reaches out for Joe’s hand and her cross at the same time. There’s finally a clink as one of the pieces of shrapnel hits the truck floor and Nile’s heart rises to her throat as she opens her eyes.

“Get ready for things to be a bit crowded in here,” Andy drawls.

Joe draws in a wet, sucking breath and suddenly Nile is crushed back into her seat, feet pinned in the footwell and a wall of fur in her face. The truck grinds to a halt and she can hear Andy climb out and move around.

Miriam and Zipphora tumble out as a unit, frantically nosing along each other’s bodies and grooming each other with paws and tongues. A hysterical laugh claws its way out of Nile’s throat.

“Two minutes,” Andy says. Her hand is resting on the seat right by Nile’s thigh and somehow the nearness is enough to be a comfort. “And next time, you two ride in the back.”

“Didn’t want to scare the kids, boss,” Nicky murmurs. He’s got Joe’s cheek cupped in his hands, watching as Joe sucks in another breath, steadying out as his guts reknit and his stomach starts to draw itself closed.

“The kids?” Joe asks first. Nile turns away when Nicky leans down to kiss him.

“Everything is fine, everyone is out,” she promises. Joe’s hand finds hers blindly and squeezes it. “How about, um, I’ll move to the back. It’ll be good practice for my Arabic.”

“I can watch, now,” Nicky agrees. Joe snorts and when Nile glances back Joe is making The Face at Nicky, mouth twisted up and eyes glossy.

“I myself would like a few more minutes of rest,” Joe agrees, “the ladies can sit on me and Nicky will take the door.”

Nile slips down as Andy climbs back into the driver’s seat, stumbles as her feet hit the ground. Zipphora surges over to support her and Nile drops to her knees, wraps her arms around the lioness’ neck and squeezes tight. There’s a huff against her neck and Miriam’s wet nose at her collar.

“We always come back,” one of them murmurs. Nile gets to her feet, straightening her clothes with embarrassment. “We’re with you, too, Nile.”

In for a penny, in for a pound. Nile strokes her fingers along the ridge of Miriam’s head, ending behind her ear as she pulls away to the back of the truck. In the side mirror, she can see Joe and Nicky repositioning slowly, the way Zipphora licks a broad stripe up Joe’s cheek as Miriam rests her chin on the open car window, snout pointed in the same direction as Nicky’s rifle.

The children are wild eyed in the back, dishevelled and huddled near the walls. The scratch of Miriam’s fur lingers in a sense memory on her fingertips as she climbs up, hands open. “My name is Nile, and this is Christopher,” Nile says slowly and clearly. “Do any of you like... chocolate? I have some.”

The children brighten and inch closer. The truck starts to move again. It’s that easy, Nile tells herself, and settles in the middle of the group near Party to pull Nicky’s fancy-ass chocolate bars out of her backpack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nile Freeman - Christopher, golden eagle  
> Andromache the Scythian - Party Horse, known officially as Partitavus the horse. (Scythians really loved horses, guys.)  
> Booker - Baudelaire (red fox)  
> Joe & Nicky - Zipphora (lioness) and Miriam (wolf)  
> Merrick - unnamed lizard (an imperfectly regenerating creature)  
> Kozak - unnamed rat (I'm not sorry)  
> Copley - unnamed cat, aka Catley.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nile dreams of drowning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HUGE APOLOGIES, yesterday was A Day and I actually forgot it was Tuesday until I was half asleep. Hope distance has made your hearts grow fonder. <3

Nile dreams of drowning. By now she doesn’t even sit up when she wakes, even though her hand does shoot out to the headboard to close over Chris’ claws. He untucks his head from his wing to look down at her. Nile breathes in for a four-count, holds and releases. She wipes the tears from her eyes.

Sleep is generally useless after a nightmare, particularly a true one. She grabs the sweatshirt she’d draped next to Chris and swings her legs over the bed slowly to avoid the creaking of springs. The direction she’d turn brings the other bed into view. First is Miriam, barely visible in the dim light but stretched out long and lean against Nicky’s front. She shifts and licks her lips loudly, Nicky’s head twitches and he presses his face closer to hers. Zipphora’s bulk rises behind Joe. Her head is on top of his like a parody of a warrior costume, but she’s also extended a catlike proprietary paw over his shoulder to rest against Nicky’s neck.

None of them move when Nile stands and collects her boots in one hand. The door isn’t pressed tightly closed for the daemons to come and go as they please, so that step is also silent and then she’s down the hallway and out the back door. Party is already outside, nosing his way peacefully through the yard with his bridle loose.

His gaze moves up to acknowledge her, but he doesn’t move his head. Nile walks over to rest a hand on his flank, starts to lower her head to press against his back. Then the bridle moves. More exactly, it twists and unclasps and the free end becomes visible as the flared head of a cobra.

Nile launches herself back, continuing several feet further after she falls thanks to the dew on the lawn. “What,” she grinds out between clenched teeth, “The actual fuck.”

The window of the bedroom slams open and Nile lets herself continue to fall so she’s propped up on her elbows, leans her head back so she can see Nicky’s armed silhouette. She should probably feel apologetic for waking him out of a dead sleep, but her pulse is pounding in her wrists and temples.

“There is a goddamn snake on your horse, Andy,” she manages. Andy pokes her head out too, takes a long look at Party’s placid form and retreats. Nile stays prone until Andy comes out and sits next to her.

“You dreamed about Quynh,” she says, another statement instead of a question.

“Still drowning,” Nile says sharply. She looks over apologetically as soon as the words are out of her mouth. “Sorry. It—it doesn’t get easier.”

Andy nods slowly. The muscles in her arms work as she shifts her legs closer. The light starts to change into full dawn and Nile feels like she’s part of a tableau.

Finally, Andy breaks the silence. “You must know the legend that witches don’t need to be near their daemons as humans do.”

“I knew a few witches in the Marines,” Nile offers. “They had birds, could do recon across the province. The military loves them.”

Andy’s mouth twists into a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “The benefits of distance weren’t always evident to people in charge. In England, when we were—“

Nile sits bolt upright. “I remember what Nicky and Joe said. They trapped her in an iron maiden because they thought you were witches."

“And in some ways,” Andy agrees, “they were right. You know it’s an... uncomfortable feeling to see a daemon reshape itself. When they saw that, and saw the way we held each other’s daemons, they decided to separate us. They took her from me.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Nile says softly.

“And you do need to know,” Andy counters. She clenches her hands into fists and a muscle tics in her jaw. “I wouldn’t let him go. Quynh had a king cobra snake and when they took her he wrapped around my neck and I wouldn’t let them close, and I kept him. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That maybe if we hit the limit of the separation they wouldn’t be able to take her further? That he’d lead me to her.”

Nile looks at the snake. Its head has retreated under Party’s mane again, retreating to a coloured rope without movement. “It didn’t work.”

“Nothing worked,” Nicky agrees quietly from behind her. “And one day, Thủy Tinh stopped speaking to us.”

Andy looks at him gratefully and picks up the story. “We couldn’t find her.”

“And—he isn’t dead,” Nile says with growing understanding. “You don’t dream about her, but you see him every day.”

“He comes and goes,” Andy says. She’s obviously aiming for a dry comment but her voice catches at the end.

“We think,” Joe adds from behind them, “that perhaps Thủ y Tinh and Quynh have come unmatched. It makes the most sense, she can’t be—“

Nile can complete the thought again. She’s seen the snake and thought it was an ever-present rope, has to scrape back to think of times she _hasn’t_ seen him. “So either Quynh is dying more slowly, or she’s becoming less connected to him.”

Andy stands abruptly, walks out into the fields. Nile paws at her eyes quickly as the two men come to sit on either side of her. She has to say it, can’t keep the knowledge inside herself. “She’s still out there, dying. Without her daemon, and slower and slower.”

“Nile,” Nicky says, so gently that Nile wonders what she must look like. She dashes the tears off her face again, they don’t even feel like they’re hers.

“Call Copley. We’re going to find her.”

\--

Copley has taken down the serial killer board in his office. It had taken a few fights, admittedly, Andy’s unwillingness to let anything about her be recorded pitted against Copley’s passion for research and collection. Nile had sat, feeling like she was stuck at her friend’s house watching her parents argue over what to feed them for dinner. Joe had been ramrod straight, arms folded and glaring at Copley over Andy’s shoulder; Nicky had browsed his book collection thoughtfully. Somewhere between the point where Nicky had sat next to her with a like-new copy of _The Origin of Species_ , and when Party threatened to kick the building down unless Andy got her way, they had compromised.

The tablets Copley hands out are a little bit like bricks, compared to the tech Nile had before she went overseas. No data, barely touch screens, looking more suited to be props in a post-apocalyptic movie than the sources of their information. Andy uses them competently but dispassionately, and at every briefing Nile finds herself stabbed with longing for Booker’s company. He would understand the pain she and Copley go through every time Joe takes out his notepad and physically records details as he reads the screen.

“I’m really going to need to bring in a specialized skillset,” Copley is saying. “I’m just not qualified to undertake _historical_ research.”

Nicky, who appears to possess only the foggiest acknowledgement that the world has changed dramatically during his extended life, points out, “You found us.”

“In the past fifty years,” Copley repeats laboriously. Despite several years of cooperation, Catley has never introduced herself or expressed any interest in the other daemons, sniffs loudly and dismissively from a fur-covered arm chair. “I found _pictures_ of you. I tracked online records. I am not a linguist, a historian, an anthropologist—“

“Diversifying careers,” Nicky scoffs.

“Do not say back in my day,” Nile interjects quickly. The other three immortals do not get the joke.

“Joe was an artist, a cook, an architect. He painted Rococo, Cubism, Impressionism, Fauvism,” Nicky continues in the same breath. Nile makes an invisible tally for the way they pause to smile at each other. “Truly what you would call a Renaissance man.”

“Look, I know you know that academia is not a monolith,” Copley says. Nicky stares him down like he’s insulted Joe instead of trying to explain an institution of which he has direct evidence that Nicky has participated in at least fourteen times. “I know you know that there are different educational streams, just like you wouldn’t ask Nile to be the sniper.”

Nicky blinks, slow as Zipphora, and then looks at Andy and grins. “Sorry, I tried,” he says.

Andy grudgingly admits, “I don’t want any more people involved in this.”

“Well, unless you want Booker—“ Copley raises both hands at their faces, “I’m going to need someone who can even _read_ what these court records say. My wife used to say my handwriting was bad, but honestly.”

“One historian. Someone who’s willing to research multiple periods,” Andy concedes. “If necessary.”

Copley nods his relief and opens the door, ushering in a round Brazillian woman with glasses and her hair knotted on top of her head. Her daemon, a capuchin, saunters in behind her and scrambles up to the tabletop. “I hoped you’d agree. This is Doctor Izabel Silvia. She’s been helping me since she came across Quynh’s story while researching religious persecution and maritime life in sixteenth century England.”

“Forthcoming from Routledge, 2025,” Silvia adds cheerfully. She sets down her briefcase and pulls out a sheaf of photocopies. “This is an unusual case, of course, because it involves both a uniquely grim punishment and because there’s a bit of jurisdictional crossover in the transfer from the priests to the captain of the—“

Andy sets her mug down very hard, splitting a hairline crack on the glass coffee table. Silvia and the capuchin look up, and the woman pushes her glasses firmly back up her nose. “I’ll send you the article manuscript. At any rate, I was able to track the known routes of the ship and cross-reference it with some of the really exciting developments in underwater archaeology. In fact, my friend—“

Again, Copley clears his throat to interrupt her. Nicky’s fingers are white against his tablet and Joe has shifted forward to prop his arm against Andy’s back, keeping her steady.

“They were waiting for carbon-dating to verify, but they found something very similar a few years ago,” Silvia finishes and pulls out a photograph of a horrifying metal face. “A submerged iron maiden off North Uist, remarkable.”

“Quynh,” Andy breathes out.

“Was she there? Is she in it,” Joe asks immediately. He’s the one to move forward and take the photo from Silvia’s hands, gripping it so carefully between his fingertips as he steps back again. “Have you found her.”

Nile is doing the math. A few years. A few can be somewhere between one and ten, probably, which means that even as she’s been screaming in time with Quynh, the coffin itself was sitting in a lab being probed with cotton swabs?

“It was a little unusual,” Silvia admits. “They actually were the second team on site. Another team had abandoned, must have had some kind of medical or technical emergency. Of course, before they left they had cut several chains around the artefact. Sloppy work, normally we try to preserve as much of the original structure as possible so we can stabilize it more effectively.”

“A few years,” Nile says weakly as she stands. “An empty coffin. You guys.”

It’s hell to see Andy’s face fall, the shuttering of Joe and Nicky’s eyes as they move to her. Nile steps forward, putting herself between them and the mortals and squaring her shoulders.

“Thanks for your help, Dr. Silvia, we’d love to see that article,” she says and gives a firm handshake. Then she turns to Copley and folds her arms. “Looks like we’re back in your wheelhouse. Start from the Scottish coast and let me know as soon as you find a trace.”

Copley is sinking distractedly into his office chair, already clicking open satellite feeds and news searches. Nile moves back in, takes Andy’s arm and pulls firmly towards the door. She knows the other two will drift in their wake, less than a perfect exit but desperate to stay close now.

“We’ll be back in a week,” she says and hopes it’s enough time to glue the pieces of her team together.

\--

“You’re not going to want to hear this,” Copley says over the phone. Nile covers her face, then shifts her hand up to massage her temples.

“At this point, when have I wanted to hear literally anything,” she groans.

Andy had uncharacteristically stayed in bed for two days, not only bracketed by Zipphora and Miriam but with Joe and Nile acting as a rotating guard service slash hospitality team. Joe had even made a tray of toast specifically for Party, although his movements had b een automated as he listed towards the bedroom and strained to hear any conversation from inside.

Nile has been pretending to be normal about this. It is not easy. She’s doing her own research in tandem with Copley, just in case she thinks of an angle he’s missed. She goes for walks and smiles warmly at the neighbours so it doesn’t look like they live in a creepy uninhabited house at the end of the street. When she notices the way Nicky’s brow pinches as Joe walks past him, she even puts her foot down and starts taking depressing shifts herself. There’s a marathon of _The Mummy_ on one of the channels. It consists, as is proper, of only _The Mummy_ and _The Mummy Returns_ played back to back, and Andy shares Nile’s pint of ice cream and snorts approvingly at Evie’s lines.

“It’s good news and bad news,” Copley says slowly, which does not relax Nile at all. “The good news is, a woman who’s five hundred years out of date with surveillance technology leaves a pretty wide swath of evidence in Europe.”

“You found her.” Nile slumps in relief. None of the team seems ready for any next steps, and she’d been planning the best way to ease them along through Copley’s updates. Despite that, she’d panicked when she’d seen his number on her cell and told Joe and Nicky that she had to run out and get tampons. Continuing the ruse (Joe will certainly already have made her hot chocolate) would just have made her feel worse.

“She’s in Paris,” Copley says flatly.

Nile is mapping the trip in her head, debating the benefits of the train versus driving and how much extra do you pay for a horse in baggage. Then, fresh in her mind in a way which he hasn’t been for the last few years, she sees Booker.

She can’t decide which question to ask first—Is he okay, is Quynh, are they together. Why hasn’t he reached out, surely this is a great time for a big-T Timeout on his banishment. Has Quynh ritualistically murdered him after going mad without her daemon?

Chris’ sharp talons draw her out of the spiral.

“Do you have his address,” she says, businesslike even if her hand is shaking. “I’m going to have to go slowly on this one.”

“Bon chance,” Copley says dryly and hangs up before he can say anything to make Nile’s day worse.

Nile takes the opportunity to feel her age as she takes the long way home. From day one, the others had been clear that they were honest with each other. Nine hundred years was a bit much for a long con, realistically, but they also _liked_ each other. They liked her, and they had liked Booker until he’d betrayed them. They probably wouldn’t want to learn he had been cut into pieces and scattered through the Catacombs.

The honest part of her, thinking of Joe’s emphatic gestures in the London pub and the way Nicky had pushed himself back from the table slowly when things got too impassioned but never once looked out the window at Booker when he’d negotiated the banishment length, has another option. If nothing else, if they’ve managed to silently nurse their anger over the past few years, they’d want to be the ones doing the scattering themselves. Nile doesn’t know, yet, what the timeline for forgiveness is when you predate modern democracy. She just knows with growing certainty that they’re hers, and family handles itself.

By the time she opens the door again, she’s resolved that every best-case option involves telling them that Quynh and Booker are sharing a postal code. She doesn’t even waver when Joe’s immediately out of the kitchen, holding out the mug of hot chocolate she’d expected and feared.

“Would you like us to leave you alone?” Nicky asks. “Or we can rent a movie, just hang out.”

“I don’t have my period,” Nile says flatly. Then, she takes a drink of the hot chocolate. It tastes perfect. “I’m sorry. I lied to you.”  
  
Joe and Nicky have different ways of approaching situations, but there are still moments where they mirror each other like they practiced making the faces. The confused disappointment, like two kicked dogs, is one of their twin looks.

Nile walks past them, trusting Miriam to scoot back when she sits on the couch so that she can sit and face them both. The daemon, unsurprisingly, slinks off and circles around the room, coming back to sit where Joe and Nicky fold themselves into the armchairs across from Nile. Nicky, as is his habit, reaches out for Miriam’s ruff, and Joe clenches and unclenches his fingers on the arms of the chair before he rests his hand on top of Nicky’s. It’s the first time she’s felt in opposition to them—even at their first meal, they’d sat at angles to break up the lines of the room, Joe’s knees pointing one way and Nicky’s another even as the attention of both focused on her.

“I shouldn’t have,” she adds. Nicky’s face softens, Joe’s doesn’t. Shocker. “I’ve been doing my own research and keeping in touch with Copley. I just—I didn’t want you guys to feel worse.”

“You cannot protect our feelings, Nile,” Joe says hoarsely.

“I know. I was just—I wasn’t sure what we were going to hear.” Nile leans forward, sets her hot chocolate down before resting her elbows on her knees and clasping her hands loosely. “Quynh and Booker are both in Paris.”

Joe shoots to his feet, cursing in Italian as he turns away and scrubs his hands through his hair. Nicky slumps back, watching her intently. Nile meets his gaze and nods once.

“Then we go to Paris,” Nicky says to her. “All of us. If that’s what it takes to find her, then it’s time for all of us.”

“Son of a bitch,” Joe adds and kicks the wall hard. Nile can hear the noise of his toes breaking, but it doesn’t stop him from doing it again and then banging his head to a stop against the wall. “We’re sitting here like idiots and somewhere out there, she could be hurting him.”

It isn’t the reaction Nile was expecting. After the pointed ways Joe avoided Booker leading up to his exile, the dramatic packing of his clothes in safe-houses across four continents, the way he refused to even watch _Disney’s Robin Hood_ in a protest “against all foxkind”?

Nicky watches him with his softest soft eyes, and then calls him back with a word. Nile doesn’t try to translate it, it’s going to be goopy. When Joe comes back to them, he sits on the arm of Nicky’s chair, one leg drawn up beneath him and the other bumping into the lioness’s side where it hangs loose.

“You’re... worried about Booker,” she says slowly. Another piece of her heart unlocks, adding love that she didn’t even know she had space for.

“I’m not worried about him,” Joe says, immediately jumping back to gruff and folding his arms up. “I’m just concerned—“

“Of course we wanted him to come home eventually,” Nicky intercedes smoothly. “We didn’t speak of it, Nile, but the exile is... Sometimes it is necessary to hurt to heal. For Booker, and for us. We knew he would come home in time.”

“And we don’t know anything about Quynh now,” Joe adds and looks sharply away, out the window. “Leaving her daemon here. Leaving _Andy_. Who would want anything to do with Booker, unless to hurt her.”

“Maybe she stopped at the first Immortal she found,” Nile offers unconvincingly. She’s surprised, too, that Joe had jumped with her to the worst case scenario. “And they’re... you know, just killing time.”

Andy snorts from the doorway. Nile jumps in unison with Miriam and Zipphora, Nicky leans his head back and closes his eyes, and Joe tips off his chair to his feet. Andy looks pale but steady, and coiled neatly around her neck with his head raised is Thủy Tinh.

“Hey, boss,” the guys say cautiously.

“I could hear you scheming to protect me from three towns away,” Andy says briskly. She squeezes Nile’s shoulder in passing and grabs a chair from the dining table, spinning it to sit in the space between Nile and the men, facing the door. “It’s not the first time the plan has changed.”

Nile isn’t sure why all three look at her, but Andy’s words make Nicky relax into a smile so it must be a good memory. Rather than recapping for Andy, she continues, “Copley’s going to send me more details. I thought a train would be good. If they’re watching the rail stations then they’re going to spot us. Whether they run, stand their ground, or come forward, it’ll be good intel.”

It’ll be like going back to the beginning, she doesn’t say. Actual Paris, this time. Finally see the Eiffel Tower if they’re not busy being shot at.

“And it’ll give us time to level out,” Andy says dryly. At Nile’s look, she adds, “I know you’ve all been worried about me. Thank you. This isn’t about me, it’s about Booker and Quynh, and Nile is right that we don’t have enough intel. We go to Paris, we find them and we decide what’s next. We can focus on what’s ahead of us instead of trying to remember which way is north on a map.”

Joe folds himself into Nicky’s lap. “We’re going to Paris,” he agrees. “I hate Paris in the spring.”

“My incurable romantic,” Nicky teases and props his chin up on his shoulder. His smile is like the sun rising, making Nile forget the moment she felt like these men could be anything other than family to her. “We’re going to Paris.”

\--

Nile is used to packing light after her time in the Marines and also apparently the only one with a state of urgency about this situation. She’d left them still sitting in the living room, frozen in place. By the time Nicky’s shadow darkens the doorway, she’s finished neatly transferring her clothes from the dresser to her duffel and is looking up weather reports in Paris to decide if she needs a windbreaker or an extra sweater.

Nicky sits down on the floor, pulls his rifle case from under the bed, and starts neatly deconstructing it.

“Uh, aren’t we heading out?” Nile asks. _Is this the time_ , she doesn’t ask. “You know, tick tock.”

“It’s been four years,” Nicky responds mildly. Somehow he’s managed to ratchet the tension of his cleaning from his usual ‘obsessive’ to a pinpoint neuroticism so thick Nile can nearly see it around him. “If they have chosen to stay in Paris, then we are not on a deadline, as such. There is no reason to be unprepared.”

“You guys,” Nile says. She feels very young. Nicky is intently brushing his fingers along the scope, following up with minute movements of his polishing cloth. He doesn’t look like he’s about to hurry. Nile puts her bag back down and heads back into the common area.

Andy is nowhere to be seen, and Party horse has left his usual hangout in the front yard. Joe is in the kitchen, up to his elbows in flour and intensely stretching pastry glass-thin across the table.

“Strudel, for the road,” he says without looking up. “How do you feel about apple and cinnamon? A bit basic, but also classic. I’ll be using the rest of the stonefruits, too.”

Nile looks from him to Zipphora and Miriam. Miriam is grooming herself fastidiously, and Zipphora’s body is all tense lines except where her tail twitches sporadically but abruptly across the floor.

“Look, are you guys okay?” she asks. “Because you do not look okay. And there’s a bakery in the train station.”

Joe exhales slowly, stands to face her as he smoothes the last corner of his dough. “You feel that we’re moving too slowly.”

“Um, yeah, I do,” Nile says. There’s a spike of irritation in her, tempered when Joe rubs his face and coats the left side of his beard with flour. “I kind of thought, based on previous missions, that we would actually _already_ be on a train.”

“We do that,” Joe concedes. He looks lost for a moment, and then bends back down to his pastry. “This is different, Nile. Not a hostage situation, not a rescue. If we go in half cocked and make the situation worse, we will live for a long time with the consequences. If we rush into this, we don’t get a do-over.”

Nile looks at Zipphora’s agitated tail and realizes that the others are scared. She’s seen them jump off moving vehicles and kill men with knives pulled out of their own stomachs. It isn’t that they don’t feel fear, but they can set it down before a mission. It’s what they do. Looking for a woman who’s clearly chosen not to be found, however, is pretty out of their remit. Apparently immortals can procrastinate too, she thinks and rolls her eyes.

“Look, I’m booking us on the five am train,” she says at last. “And a stonefruit strudel does sound amazing.”

Things seem more relaxed the next morning. Nicky balances the overstuffed box of pastries and a bag that Nile knows holds more ammo than a standard mobile tac unit. Andy takes the front facing window seat, kicks her feet up to rest on Zipphora’s back and shuts her eyes. Joe, still bleary and with his hair barely contained by his ballcap, pauses to squeeze Nile’s arm as he goes past.

“No problem,” she says in response to his silent gratitude. She pushes him towards Nicky and the other reverse-facing seat, claiming the spot next to Andy for herself. “Now, are we playing Poker or Whist.”

\--

It isn’t easy playing tourist when your daemon is so big they nearly qualify for their own entry fee. Andy and Party don’t acknowledge the looks that others in the crowd give them when Nile leads the way into the Louvre, but behind her she can hear Nicky politely greeting other tourists in French to disarm the instinctive panic people feel when they see Zipphora. Miriam, at least, could be a dog if you squinted. Lionesses and horses spend very little time on the Metro.

They’d brought Copley on speakerphone several hours before the French border, talking around the subject uncomfortably in code in case there were eavesdroppers. They settle on a plan of graduated investigation, with the first level being exposure in the wildly unlikely chance that Quynh’s silence was a miscommunication rather than a choice. It’s perfect for Nile, who still hasn’t outgrown her excitement in new places. She gets them into Notre Dame, which is perfection, and up to the top of the Champ Elysee, where Chris launches off her shoulder for twenty minutes of blissful twirling through the high winds as she leans out to track him against the blueness of the sky. Joe volunteers to accompany her on the tour of the Catacomb s, though he doesn’t put the headphones in and seems much more interested in her responses than their surroundings. Nicky draws the line when she suggests Versailles.

“I bet it still reeks,” he says with finality. “A big, fancy toilet. What hubris.”

So, the Louvre instead. Nile treats herself to fifteen minutes of “So, is this you,” in the ancient art area, Andy responding yes or no without even following Nile’s pointing figure. They drift to a halt in front of a warrior woman with a striking jawline and Nile blinks in awe.

“So, broadcast the boom boom boom boom,” she starts after the silence stretches comfortably. The other three stare blankly at her. “Come on, guys. Down the back, but who cares, still the Louvre?

Nicky smiles in polite confusion. “Actually, Joe is in the Richelieu wing.”

“Not me,” Andy adds about the statue. “I stole the bust of me sixty years ago.”

Nile groans her disappointment. “You know what, you guys don’t even get culture. I can’t even handle you. I bet you don’t even listen to my mixtapes.”

“I listened,” Andy says and smirks. “I knew some of the stuff already, but you put some really low tempo stuff there in the end. How does the song go, so I took a big,”

“Chance,” Joe and Nicky chorus without looking up from the map they’ve pulled out and are studying together.\

“At the highschool,” Andy continues mercilessly as Nile’s jaw drops.

“Dance,” again in unison.

“You. Know Run DMC.”<

“I have been listening to Run DMC since before you were born,” Andy says with surprising primness. “Let’s go tick off the big ticket items here, I want to get back to the hotel to review Copley’s footage before supper.”

The days have all been like that, moments of absurdity and history interspersed with grim reminders that Nile both is and isn’t an actual tourist. They’re playing a game here, and they’re not winning. Nile has never spent so much time looking over her shoulder. Day four of their “vacation” and she feels like the faces are blurring together, keeps double checking that the man walking past with the floppy blond hair _isn’t_ Booker. Andy has been coiling like a spring after being so consistently and purposefully exposed, and hour three in the Louvre is where she snaps.

Standing four abreast and staring up at the massive Veronese, she says, “This isn’t working.”

Joe pops the bubble of his gum like a rifle crack and Andy’s whole body twitches. He doesn’t look away from the painting, just repeats the action slightly louder. She pivots to face him. “Are you fucking serious right now?”

“Just looking at the art,” Joe says mildly. He’s got his sunglasses on inside and his hat on backwards, one popped collar (and a well maintained beard) away from a high school kid on his graduation trip. Andy groans and throws her hands up, marching away with Party to look at another wall.

“You shouldn’t tease. She’ll get there in her own time,” Nicky says with affection. Joe grins and shrugs unapologetically, then turns to follow Andy. The daemons split without thought of which had been with which man initially. Nile is pretty sure Joe had picked Miriam up when they took the escalator because she hated the texture of the metal on her paws, but it’s Zipphora who slinks after him now.

When Nile moves to do the same, Nicky catches her elbow gently and nods his head in the other direction. “You have to see the statue garden. It’s very impressive, and only some of it is stolen.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen any of you argue since Booker,” Nile says distantly, but lets herself be led. “And maybe that time Joe brought home multivitamins for Andy because Party said that old people have brittle bones.”

“Sometimes you need to fight.” Nicky shifts them and places her hand gently in his inner elbow. “Andy knew this would be frustrating but it is so personal. And Joe—Joe is happy to provide an excuse.”

Joe had once laughed and spit in the face of a drug runner who was holding a gun to Nile’s head. She doesn’t always love his willingness to be provocative, but it is certainly in character.

“Oh look, Francis of Assisi,” Nicky adds when she doesn’t speak up immediately. It’s a blatant distraction attempt and Nile shoves him with her free arm without disentangling her hand from his elbow.

“Yeah, sure, I want to play the ‘identifying medieval saints’ game with a medieval priest,” she grouses. Nicky laughs and she tugs him forward again. “I was promised statues, old man.”

When they find Andy and Joe in the cafe, Andy seems relaxed again. She has a sandwich, all the vegetables picked out and stacked on the side of her plate so really she’s just eating bread and meat. Nile looks between Andy and Joe quickly, catches the way Zipphora affectionately headbutts Miriam and settles down without tension. Joe slides a cup of espresso over to Nicky and produces a water bottle for Nile.

“You’re right, Andy,” Nicky says. “We should move to phase two. We go to Booker tonight.”

\--

Everyone but Party, who seems to still have Run DMC stuck in his head and is humming the guitar riff, sits silently as the metro car moves them further from the central arrondissements. They don’t look particularly subtle, Andy’s black tanktop is a little too thin for the season and Thủy Tinh is again wrapped around her neck, gliding slowly to rub his coils together in a way that instinctively makes Nile’s skin crawl. She’s also been unable to convince Nicky that wearing the hood up on his sweater makes him look like he is ready to shank someone in an alley. Joe is even more direct, because no matter how casually he flips it in his hands, he couldn’t be holding anything other than a switchblade.

Dinner had been lost to arguing about the level of preparedness necessary. Nile thought they should go straight in, unarmed. Minimally armed, she corrected herself when she looked at the three. Just like Jackie Chan, any of these people is a weapon in themselves. Joe had put three flashbangs in the pockets of his cargo pants, removing them only when Nile turned her best mom-look on him. Nicky had been slightly more practical: even if his hand did linger on the scabbard of his sword, he put it back under the bed without prompting and chose instead to tuck a pistol in the back of his waistband. Joe compromises with a series of knives concealed in increasingly obscure places and Andy takes her usual pistol. Nile figures this could qualify as “moderately armed,” and takes the win where she can get it.

Booker’s address is a battered apartment without an elevator or buzzers at the door. Nile’s mother would call the building “full of character,” and already the variation in quality of housing during missions has Nile aware of how much worse it could be. She’d worn Andy down into letting her take the lead entry with a series of increasingly desperate moves: first a thought-out argument about how she’d planned the op herself, then a low-dig reminder that one of the last times Andy had taken the lead with Booker, she’d nearly bled out in a pharmacy tycoon’s lab, and finally with a cut-throat game of rock paper scissors.

When Booker opens the door, everyone freezes. Baudelaire moves first, lifting her head out of her tail and saying, “They’re real, Book.”

“What are you doing here?” he asks hoarsely. Nile glances back at the other immortals. Joe is covering the stairs so intently he could be an action hero in _the Walking Dead_ , Nicky is rubbing his mouth slowly and staring. Andy takes a half step towards him, comes level with Nile. Booker meets her gaze for a slow moment and then his face crumples and he nods. “You’re here for her.”

Nile pushes herself forward and wraps Booker in a tight hug. He sighs and slumps into her, hands tentatively coming up to her back and hovering just outside of contact. When they part, he looks calmer, manages to meet Andy’s gaze and nod. He warns, “She’s different.”

“Do we have company, Booker,” says a melodic voice from inside. Nile gets her first clear look at Quynh and assesses her instinctively.

Where Booker looks worn down and stretched thin, Quynh is all smooth corners and dewy skin. Correction: her skin is perfect, her hair is perfect. She’s one of those terrifying girls from school who looks like she dressed intentionally, even for an eight-am exam. But when Nile meets her eyes, she also looks cat-in-a-sack crazy, like she’s holding all the broken pieces of herself together in one big handful.

“And you must be Nile,” Quynh adds smoothly. Nile feels the same measuring look sweep over her, greeting and dismissing her. “And the boys. Of course.”

“Quynh,” Nicky says softly. He’s lowered his gun completely, it hangs uncharacteristically lose by his side. “You got out.”

There’s a lightning quick flash in Quynh’s eyes, dismissed as she continues to act the hostess role. “Drinks, anyone? We have... whisky, vodka, rum, and moonshine. Oh, and water. Of course.”

Andy walks forward as in a dream, gently disentangling the snake from her neck as she goes. Nile feels herself trapped as a witness, sucks in a breath as the coils are eased over Quynh’s head and the snake settles around her neck and on her shoulders.

Then Quynh moves, faster than Nile can track.

Andy makes a punched out noise and hunches, and Booker’s voice is cracking when he yells, “No,” and starts to reach out for her. Time slows down and the sound drops from Nile’s life briefly. She can see Joe look back and swing his gun around. Nicky has dropped his and is halfway into the room by the time Booker has reached Andy’s side.

And Thủy Tinh, fast as Quynh and writhing in panic, lashes out and sinks his teeth into Quynh’s neck.

Andy is bleeding, the knife still in her stomach. The sound snaps back to full volume, Joe yelling incoherently and Nicky pleading and Booker frantically repeating, “She’s mortal now, she’s mortal.”

“Put pressure on it,” Nile says automatically, rips her sweater off to catch the blood. “Get her down flat, it’ll be okay Andy.”

Andy doesn’t look at her, watching Quynh fall to her knees and then down beside her. The two women slowly reach out, fingertips brushing as the snake daemon darts away into the dark space under the couch.

“I had to do it,” Quynh says to Andy, focused as if the rest of them weren’t in the room.

“I know. It’s okay.” Andy’s teeth are bloody when she smiles. “Kept him safe for you, though. At least I could keep that promise.”

Nile laces her fingers through Booker’s so they can both put pressure on the wound. The room is crowded with distressed daemons and the guys are stunned out of their normal easy rhythm, nearly running into each other when they both turn to follow her directions and tripping over Miri’s haunches on the way to the kitchen. Nile musters undeserved confidence and steadies her voice. “We’re all going to be okay. Hold on, Andy.”

Andy looks away from Quynh and smiles up at Nile. She brings a hand up, squeezes the back of Nile’s neck firmly.

Party vanishes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nile Freeman - Christopher, golden eagle  
> Andromache the Scythian - Party Horse, known officially as Partitavus the horse.  
> Booker - Baudelaire (red fox)  
> Joe & Nicky - Zipphora (lioness) and Miriam (wolf)  
> Copley - unnamed cat, aka Catley.  
> Quynh - Thủy Tinh (king cobra)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our immortals feel the consequences of their actions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I don't know if my frenetic energy in the comments has made it clear enough, I very much enjoy comments (as do we all, admittedly) but also FUCKING LOVE TALKING ABOUT THE WRITING PROCESS AND WHAT IS HAPPENING AND THESE BEAUTIFUL IDIOTS HAVING THEIR ADVENTURES. So if you want to partake in mutual yelling, absolutely hit me up!

Time passes. Nile keeps the pressure on Andy’s stomach even when there’s no new blood. Booker untangles himself gently, places both hands on either side of Quynh’s neck as her breath becomes ragged. The distant part of Nile’s brain thinks, snake bite. She’d looked up Thủy Tinh after realizing that he was a thing to be looked up. Fast snake, fast venom.

Quynh gasps shallowly and clutches her chest. There’s a stir of movement, the snake daemon reemerging from his hiding place and sliding back to her, coiling himself near where Booker’s hand steadies the base of her skull. He murmurs her name, the first time Nile has heard him speak, and his voice is beautiful. Then he’s gone too.

Nile’s arms are shaking from the pressure. The pounding of her heart is the loudest thing she can hear, but beneath that there’s an agonized howl that could come from either Joe or Miriam, ragged breathing from where Booker has hunched himself over so his head is against Quynh’s. She tears her gaze up and Nicky is on his knees near Joe, one arm braced against Joe’s thigh to keep him up right as his mouth moves in rapid prayers. Joe’s face is in his hands and his shoulders shake.

“They’re gone,” Nile forces out, trying to convince herself. She rolls back on her heels and then slumps to the side, wipes at her nose with a bloody hand. Andy has the nerve to look peaceful, smiling with her hand clasped loosely around Quynh’s.

“Oh Booker, what have you done now,” Joe asks despairingly from the couch, face still hidden. “How could you do this.”

“It wasn’t time, I told her that Andy had lost her immortality. I thought she was starting to do better and that some day, we would come back to you.” Booker’s affect is flat, he’s not trying to convince them of anything or defend himself. He stares forward, eyes unfocused. “I told her about Andy. I told her we’d kept Thủy Tinh safe.”

“Come here,” Nicky says harshly, and the solider in Nile follows his command and crawls to his side. He grabs for Booker too and wraps them in his arms, presses their heads together at the middle point. Joe’s weight settles on Nile a moment later, her shirt soaking where his face is pressed on her shoulder. She grabs out for any of the daemons and could sob in relief when she gets a handful of feathers, gathers Chris’s wings together and pulls him gently towards her.

She hears Zipphora’s warning rumble before she can recognize the new sound in the room as breathing. Quynh is rising slowly, one hand to her throat and the other still holding Andy’s. Nile reaches for her gun through the tangle of limbs, pushes away to set herself defensively between the grieving men and the revived woman.

Quynh doesn’t look her way, curling her legs up so she can lean over Andy and smooth back her hair so gently. She’s crying too, Nile realizes, and silent except for the smallest shifts of fabric and air when she leans down to kiss Andy’s forehead and murmur to her.

“It’s done,” she says. “I’m sorry, Booker. Joseph, Nicolo.”

Her eyes turn finally to Nile, shimmering and still insane but somehow, less. Settled. “I wish I didn’t meet you this way, Nile.”

Nicky is the one who moves next, his comforting arm on Joe’s back slipping sideways so he can extract one of the many knives. “We looked,” he says.

“You stopped.” Quynh rocks back to sit on her heels, folds her hands in her lap. “I forgive you.”

Nicky throws the knife and Nile turns away before it hits its target squarely. Her fingers are locked around the gun and she spends the time before Quynh’s next revival trying to remember how to move them, trying to breath relaxing thoughts into the spasms of her index finger.

“Do you feel better now, Nico?” Quynh asks softly. Her blouse is ruined now, like so many of the outfits Nile has churned through in the last few years. A swift, smooth move buries the knife taken from her chest into the floor. Somehow, she’s smiling.

“A little,” Nicky admits. As fast as he’d wept, he and Quynh are shaking with laughter. Shaking generally, Nile thinks. Hysteria. Panic, grief, adrenaline withdrawal. Quynh rises, setting Andy’s hand so-gently on her chest and walks over to hug the three men near the couch.

Nile is not ready to forgive. She also won’t shoot an unarmed woman in the back, even if none of them are unarmed for the given definition of the term. She slumps back as Chris tries with agitation to fly around the room, settles without grace on the back of a grotty kitchen chair.

“And now, really, I must get you drinks,” Quynh says. “Nile most of all, I think.”

Nile’s back meets a warm, giving side. Party announces, “We’ll take whisky, thanks.”

The room is silent for three loud ticks of the clock on the wall. Then they’re scrambling, tripping up to huddle around Andy. She’s still not visibly moving and Party is on the ground, shakily trying to get all four legs under himself to stand. And then, one slow inhale deep enough to inflate every corner of Andy’s lungs.

“Stop staring,” she mutters with her eyes still shut. “I was just getting used to the quiet.”

Quynh whoops and Nile is both surprised and aware that she shouldn’t be when the woman leans down and kisses Andy firmly on the lips. Andy follows her as she pulls away, sitting herself up with a disgruntled gasp. She touches the hole in Quynh’s shirt gently, looks back at Joe who is openly weeping. He nods in turn to Nicky and Andy rolls her eyes and smiles.

“Okay, one hug. You guys look desperate,” she allows. Nile ends up near the centre of the pile again, can feel the press of a gun against her forearm where she’s got it around Andy’s back. Also, besides the overwhelming tang of blood, she becomes aware that Quynh, of course, smells really great.

When Joe and Nicky relax their grip, she pulls free and leaves Andy and Booker pressing their foreheads together in silence. Party has made it up but also has a lioness hanging off his left flank, Zipphora purring loudly as she rubs her cheek against his side. Christopher chirps his own pleasure from his sideways position on Party’s mane, scratching the back of the horse’s ear gently with his beak. Miriam is twisting sinuously around his legs and there, visible briefly on her fur before he transfers to wend his way up Party’s leg, is Thủy Tinh.

Nile wipes her eyes. She’s smiling. Her mouth is so stretched it hurts, and there’s a roiling sensation in her stomach. She gains her feet, twists over until her back cracks sharply and heads for the kitchen. There are steps behind her as she cleans the glasses in the sink, and Booker leans backwards next to her on the counter, propping himself up with his elbows.

“You look good, Nile,” he says quietly. “It’s good to see you. Thank you for asking Joe and Nicky not to shoot me."

“Oh, they made that choice independently.” She snorts at his startled look, at the disbelieving fondness he projects towards the living room. “And don’t think I missed that apparently when Quynh kills someone, an apology is all that’s needed.”

Booker meets her eyes for a long moment and then they both crack up. Nile gets soaked when she leans forward into the water, splashes him as he snorts and grips his sides. Nicky was kind and Joe was welcoming, but Booker understood. It takes them a long time to settle, bursts of laughter getting shorter and further between.

Nile clicks the last glass down in the row, six for the first time. “I actually have this project I’ve been working on that you could help me with,” she says as Booker carefully fills each glass fuller than politeness dictates.

“Anything,” he says absently. He goes to tip the bottle towards his mouth, pauses and sets it untouched back next to the full glasses.

“Nicky says he can’t remember if Zipphora or Miriam was his first, and I’ve been trying to research the period to figure it out.”

Booker’s face brightens. “You know, I spent ten years trying to figure out if Nicky really had met monkeys in Genoa. The man lies like a rug. It will be so much easier with the internet to help.”

"And with two of us,” Nile adds quietly. She smiles up at him, her cheeks hurting. Booker gives her an abrupt, one armed hug. He’s flushed with pleasure and Nile is boneless with relief. A hundred years, she thinks. Traded for one life, and everyone has got the best end of the deal.

It isn’t as easy as all of that.

She’s learned to appreciate that Andy, Joe and Nicky are capable of having conversations that unintentionally exclude her. She’s working her way through Italian because that seems to be the one they tell the most jokes in, but the version they use sometimes is like trying to understand dick jokes in a Shakespeare play. Nile is getting there, but she’d still take an annotated text for now. Beyond that, they’ve known each other for legitimately hundreds of years, they recognize each other’s tics and postures instinctively. So while Nile knows something has changed when she and Booker return, balancing three glasses each in their hands, she can’t quite identify what.

Quynh and Andy, still on the floor, accept her glasses and cheers each other silently. Booker takes the other two to the men back on the couch. Joe accepts his from Booker absently, draining it in one go and still watching Andy and Quynh like they’ll disappear without supervision. Nicky glances dismissively at the glass, then directly past Booker’s ear, and then stands. Booker is slightly too close for the movement, for a second they’re chest to chest. Then Nicky sidesteps neatly and heads silently for the door. Miriam shakes herself hard and follows him. Unexpectedly, Zipphora also rises with a slinky stretch and a dismissive look at Booker.

Booker’s shoulders slump and he takes Nicky’s seat carefully. He knocks back one of the glasses of whiskey and sets it on the floor before cupping the other in both hands. Nile has experienced a lot of uncomfortable silence since her first death, but she can’t even think of what she could say to fix this one.

“We should split to travel,” Andy says at last. “Quynh and I have some things to talk about, and—“

“I’ll take care of Nicky,” Joe agrees as if that had ever been in doubt. He hesitates and then claps a hand down heartily on Booker’s shoulder, pulls it away before Booker can move to touch him back. “Where do you want us, boss?”

“Victor safehouse, one week,” she says and they exchange a nod. Joe tucks his hands in his pockets and trudges out after Nicky.

“I take it,” Quynh says, not unkindly, “that Joe remains the gentler man.”

Nile has never thought of it like that. But then, she’s also never even cheated Nicky at cards, let alone betrayed and sacrificed him in the name of scientific discovery. Or, and she suspects that an even more grievous sin was Booker’s willingness to sacrifice Joe.

“I should stay here. He deserves to be mad,” Booker says haltingly. Nile tries to remember if he’d apologized before, and comes up blank. She hopes he had and she’d just forgotten because of the stress, but she doesn’t have as much faith in that as she does that Booker, right now, is trying to change.

“You’ll take Nile to Victor. She hasn’t been.”

Nile nods. She isn’t ready to have a conversation about ancient feelings on a bloody floor in a nearly condemned French tenement. This is the sort of thing you talk about after all-you-can-eat wings when you’re slightly drunk and too full to stay angry.

The only thing Booker brings with him from his home is Baudelaire, and that doesn’t really count as packing. He stays silent, trailing half a step behind Nile as she grabs her own bag from the safehouse and crams an extra bottle of water into the front pocket.

“So, how do you think everyone else is traveling?” she asks.

He starts, then squints up at the sky. “Andy and Quynh are probably going to ride part way, if anything Joe and—if any of their old stories are true. The other two, probably a car.”

“So we bus.” The least chance of running into anyone, or two particular ones who had both idly debated the most painful death in a casual context that could easily be applied to the man in front of her. “Kind of like taking the scenic route.”

He shoots her a grateful look and takes the lead to the bus station, buys two tickets to Italy.

Nile waits until they’re settled near the back of the bus in adjacent seats, and then asks, “So. Ostia?”

“It’s a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Rome,” Baudelaire answers for Booker. “Not a lot of tourists, close to the coast or Fiumicino for an emergency evac. Beaches, if there’s time. Plus, the mafia are pretty big there, so no one has ever bothered us as long as we keep our heads down and don’t act too local.

“We bought it just after they founded it because it’s near an ancient Roman port town. They were trying to make me feel comfortable, wanted to give me the opportunity to laugh at Andy a little bit. It was—It was still early for me, after my sons died.”

“So it’s a place you feel safe,” Nile says with a surge of warmth for Andy.

“It is also an Italian town,” he says tiredly. “And as far as I’ve ever felt, the only difference between the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian seas is that people really liked to claim sections of bodies of water for themselves.”

Then, also a place where Nicky feels safe. The house is bland, the same creamy white stone and orange roofs of every other building in the street. It smells musty and stale; they’re the first ones in. Booker heads upstairs immediately, Nile can hear him kicking off his shoes and then the creak of mattress springs as he lies down. She doesn’t roll her eyes, barely, sets herself to the task of opening the windows and throwing bedding into a tired looking washing machine.

Andy and Quynh arrive near the end of the week. They look tired but happier. Andy no longer looks like Quynh might vanish into a puff of smoke if anything distracted her, and Quynh and Thủy Tinh have come to some sort of detent.

Therapy, Nile thinks, we all need therapy. That’s not going to be the first conversation she raises.

At 11:55 pm on the seventh day after they’d separated in Paris, Joe and Nicky enter the house.Nile thinks they look less good. In the short breaks they’d allowed themselves when Andy had grown too frustrated with their fussing and kicked them out of the house, they’d always returned loose limbed. Usually with presents. Nicky looks like he might not have slept the whole time, and Joe’s face is a little lopsided because he’s trimmed his beard unevenly. They still take the time to fold each woman into a hug. Joe lingers on Andy with unexpected gentleness compared to their usual greetings, and Nicky rests his hands on Nile’s shoulders and checks her over gently.

“All fine here,” she says. “As usual. Good drive?”

“As usual,” he says mildly. Zipphora weaves past them to lay on the only three person couch in the room, both front and back legs stretched out extravagantly. Miriam hovers behind Nicky’s knees cautiously, keeping a sharp eye on the room.

The stairs creak when Booker walks down them, but Nile would still have known from the abrupt tension in Miriam and Zipphora.

“Good drive, Book?” Joe asks mildly. The lioness daemon moves enough to let him sit next to her, and Nicky guides Nile onto the loveseat at right angles from them.

“It’s good to see you, Joe,” Booker says instead. If he’d been a nail biter he wouldn’t have any cuticles left after their trip, for all the effort both he and Nile had made to have easy conversations and point sights out as they go. It was strange, realizing that she’d spent that time with him and Andy and had thought that he’d become her friend, then resigning herself to the hundred years demanded by Nicky and Joe, and then back to false comfort.

Joe smiles awkwardly at his hands. Nicky finds a point on the ceiling incredibly fascinating.

“We need to be back together,” Andy cuts through the uncomfortable context points and bypasses the debate. “I need us to be together, now.”

Nile’s leg is pressed against Nicky’s and she can feel him tense up. He keeps his gaze upwards, hands purposefully relaxed on his knees.

“I agree,” Quynh says. The balance is shifting, Nile can tell, redistributing gradually between the other two women. Quynh smiles mischievously. “And if it makes you feel better, Nicolo, I did torture Booker for a few days.”

“It’s Nicky now,” he says flatly. Miriam growls, soft and sustained, from her position on the floor.

“We think,” Joe says very carefully, to his hands instead of the group, “that we need more time.”

“You can have it,” Andy says definitively. “But you’re going to have it while Booker is here.”

Unusually, Nicky and Joe don’t look at each other at the statement. Nile stirs restlessly. She wants to put her vote behind keeping Booker, but Nicky looks… hurt and exhausted, and somehow saying the right thing at this moment feels like it would just be another burden on him.

“I’m sorry,” Booker says very softly. “I’m sorry for what I did, Nicky—“

And Nicky is standing again, their daemons rising so quickly to flank him that Zipphora nearly knocks Joe off the couch. Nile understands his Italian, “I understand, boss,” and then loses the thread on his second comment. Joe looks devastated, stands as well but moves to guard Nicky’s six instead of staying next to him. He glances back at Nile with his crooked smile, the bad-news smile, as they head up the stairs.

“He’s never going to let it go,” Booker groans into his hands. “I should just leave.”

“He will, eventually,” Quynh says with confidence. “He forgave Joe despite their rough beginning.”

“Not himself, though,” Andy says very quietly. She’s looking at the empty stairs, frowning. “Still, it’s what needs to be done, and they’ll do it.”

“So,” Quynh says and turns abruptly to Nile. “I was reading that there’s an ancient Roman port city. We should go visit it tomorrow.” 

More touring, Nile thinks. Somehow she can work up even less excitement about this than their efforts to draw out Quynh and Booker throughout Paris. But she goes, lets Andy explain things to her and Quynh make up wild and obviously false stories about historical figures as they walk through Rome. She eats her body weight in coffee gelato. Nicky and Joe are present but distant, joining them at meals but not selfie-breaks and always with their heads together, talking quietly in their own language.

Quynh seems nearly manic in her attempt to keep everyone around her engaged. Still, they’re not ready for missions—obviously, they can’t even successfully support each other through a shopping trip right now. The safehouse for four pinches their group, particularly with two large predators, a horse, and three men who are determined not to speak to each other despite keeping the same daily schedules.

“A real vacation,” Quynh says when they’ve exhausted their opportunities for day trips. “You know, Andy, I haven’t had a real vacation in so long.”

Andy says yes to her, just as resolutely and calmly as she’d said no to Booker when he wanted to leave and Nicky before he could stitch together his protest. Nile isn’t ready to be in the middle of a family feud this sprawling, so she packs her swimsuit and a beach read and gets ready to be more uncomfortable for a few more years.

\--

The beach house is glorious. Nile had been surprised when Quynh had suggested relocating to another seaside retreat for them to recover. Hadn’t she had enough of water, after five hundred years of intimate experience of the Atlantic? But Kho Yao Noi greeted them with uninterrupted stretches of white sand and blue-green waters. The air was thick with humidity but the heat was _perfect_. Nile was going to live in a caftan.

She springs out of bed and twists her braids up to the top of her head, perches a hat precariously on top of that. Everyone else must be asleep, she thinks, the house and everything around it are quiet.

She comes across the other five on the porch. They’re lounging in the sun, yes, Booker with a tilley hat and sunglasses, Nicky as far away from him as is possible to be on the boards with bright red down his back, and Joe on the steps with both feet planted in the sand. Quynh and Andy have their legs twined together on the divan, and the daemons appear to have all taken a page from Zipphora’s usual playbook and are lounging in the nearby shade. And each of her beloved, immortal, vacationing family is holding their own huge, thick book.

Nile doesn’t screech to a halt like the Roadrunner, but it’s a close thing. “You guys never take a vacation before?” she asks incredulously.

Nicky shoots her a confused look and lifts his book for her to read the front page. It looks like a technical manual, the cover densely packed with writing and pictures. He cheerily announces, “I’m reading about solid modeling tools.”

Nile puts her hands on her hips. “We’re on vacation.”

“What better time to improve yourself,” Quynh says airily, “than when no one is trying to kill you? I am reading _Rise to Globalism_ , to gain familiarity with the current geo-political context. It is not the worst book I have read.”

Andy holds up a battered book on vegetable carving. Nile starts to form a question and then shakes her head. “I don’t even want to know. No, I do. Booker, why.”

Nile didn’t know that they even made hard copies of academic journals outside of university libraries, but Booker has a stack next to him, both open and closed and with some spines cracked to specific pages. “I’m catching up the developments in computer security. Andy had a vibrant career as a food artist a few decades ago, likes to keep her hands in.”

“More than one way to use a knife,” Andy agrees dryly. Nile figures she’s probably collected the gamut, but is also going to demand a fruit bouquet for their next big dinner.

She wheels finally to Joe who neatly folds down the page of his book before grinning up at her. “I’m rereading _A Perfect Stranger_. A woman falls in love with a handsome man on the street even though she’s married to an aging, sickly man.”

“Danielle Steel,” Nile responds. He holds the book up, cover directed towards her, and looks inordinately pleased. “You read--“

“Reread,” he corrects. “They’re very exciting and romantic.”

“It’s not like the old days,” Andy says, going back to her book. “We have to keep learning to adapt effectively. I got you a beginner’s Latin workbook. Should be easy for you, with the romance language background, and it’ll stand you well when you decide to do more medical training.”

“Hell no,” Nile shouts to the sky. Chris launches himself up with a shriek, making quickly for the beach. “I have been shot, and watched you stab each other in various ways, and I have learned how to groom a horse so your daemon doesn’t get his forelock tangled. And we are going swimming.”

Booker follows her first, scooping up Baudelaire as he passes and draping her over a shoulder. “The kid says we should swim, boss. I think we gotta swim.”

“Race you,” Joe adds and he’s up and running past her, kicking up sand behind him. Nicky groans and pushes himself onto his elbows.

“My love plays dirty,” he says tragically as Booker and Joe charge into each other, shoving and scrambling as they hit the surf. Nicky takes his pants off and folds them neatly, adjusts his swim trunks and twists side to side before jogging after them. “I should save him before he does something stupid.”

More distantly over the surf Nile hears Booker announce, “Four hundred that you can’t catch that fish bare handed,” and Joe, equally passionate, retort, “The fish will swim willingly into my hand compared to your reflexes, five hundred!”

Nile turns back to the two women, squaring her shoulders and squinting. “Well?”

Andy pauses and then laughs, a sound that’s still surprising in its frequency and clarity in the past few days. “Let’s go then.”

Party, Thủy Tinh back around his neck, prances into the surf at the edge as Andy strides forward, shedding her overshirt and smoothly diving before she’s reached waist deep. Quynh stops at the water’s edge, looking down where the foam hits her toes. Nile hesitates, then holds out a hand. Quynh’s palm is warm and solid.

“Teams of two,” Joe bellows as he emerges from the surf, Booker rising a second after him sputtering and spitting water. “Winner picks the restaurant tonight.”

“Winner doesn’t have to listen to his teammates having sex in the next room,” Booker retorts. He extends a hand to Andy, holding steady as she vaults up to sit on his shoulders and flexes once.

“A fair and honest prize,” Joe says solemnly. “My love, would you be so kind?”

Nicky sighs and inclines a shoulder. “Always your pack horse, beloved one. We gamble with things of great consequence now.”

Nile sees some groping as Joe scrambles into place. If he’s less coordinated than Andy, it’s definitely on purpose. She glances at Quynh, still on the edge of the water. “So. You want to show these suckers who’s boss?”

Quynh shoots her a sneaky, vibrant smile. “Climb on.”

\--

Quynh is drowning, and fighting, and drowning.

Nile wakes when she’s already sitting up, a hand reaching out in front of her hopelessly. She looks to the side, but of course a beachside villa has multiple rooms and, after Nile and Quynh had roundly kicked everyone’s asses in the water for the fifth day running, Joe had insisted that he needed time alone with Nicky to heal his wounded pride. The lascivious look directed at his partner was almost too much for Nile to bear, and then Nicky had taken a half step in, slipped his hand down to squeeze Joe’s ass.

“No,” Booker had said sadly from behind his computer screen.

“There are rules at play, Nicolo,” Andy had agreed with fake sternness.

“We lost,” Nicky says placidly. “Joe will be very quiet.”

Not like that hadn’t been enough to keep Nile awake, but it’s only three and she knows that she’s just resigned to an early morning start. She heads downstairs, carrying Chris in her arms as he resolutely refuses to stop pretending to sleep. Quynh, alive and bone dry, is sitting on the kitchen island.

Nile hops up next to her, sets Chris down gently between them. Quynh doesn’t look up from where Thủy Tinh is twisting slowly around her fingers. Whisper soft, she murmurs, “I dreamed I was drowning.”

“Me too.”

Quynh squeezes her eyes closed, draws her hands towards her stomach. “Really, all I have dreamed in the past hundred years is drowning, and you. I thought that when I was released, I would truly be free.”

Nile knocks her heels gently against the side of the island. “You know, I’m learning that just because we heal up fast doesn’t mean we’re doing okay,” she starts carefully. Quynh stills and seems to be listening, so Nile tilts her head back and continues. “I still see the first guy I killed. Afghanistan, he was hiding in the women’s quarters. Shot him twice in the chest, just like I was trained. He pushed my hands away when I tried to help him. I saw him, and you.”

“I still feel like my hands are scraped raw,” Quynh agrees quietly.

“Sometimes I have to make myself remember that I’m not falling.”

“I can’t even remember what it felt like, to sleep between Andromache and Lykon. To feel safe.”

“I miss my mom.”

They both take deep, unsteady breaths. Then there’s a gentle pressure on Nile’s shoulder as Quynh leans against her. Chris ruffles himself and presses his small head into her thigh and Nile smiles weakly.

“Wonder what fucked up shit the others dream, huh,” Quynh sighs at last.

“Nicky is still complaining about the significance of tomatoes in Italian cuisine. I bet that’s a recurring one.” In fact Nicky, as Nile has seen enough times to understand how it haunts him, tends to wake up weeping and with a hand pressed to his stomach. He’s always turning towards Joe as he opens his eyes and doesn’t seem to relax until Joe looks back at him. Nile hasn’t asked yet what he remembers, but one day she will. She has also heard him whimper on one memorable night out in the countryside when he was restlessly dozing because Joe and Andy on a different mission, ‘No please, don’t do that to the parmesan.’

Quynh chuckles. “I had my first tomato in Glasgow. They call it an English breakfast, even though they insist they are not in England. I like them, very sweet and versatile.”

“We should make caprese salad. Tomatoes and cheese, you’ll dig it.” Nile turns her head to look at Quynh. “Neither of us are the right ones to tell each other the nightmares will stop, huh.”

“I can’t remember if they ever did.” Quynh bumps her shoulder again, slides off the table. “The important thing is that we try to enjoy being awake.”

Nile stays seated as Quynh retreats back towards the bedrooms. Chris flutters himself and mutters, “As welcome-to-immortality handbooks go, I trust their recommendations.”

“Some good advice,” she agrees and pets gently down his spine. “And when it’s not, it’s not the worst thing to see that even old people can still mess up a situation. I still miss her.”

“Of course,” Chris shrugs, pivots and hops himself around until he’s got his claws hooked in her pyjama pants, precariously balanced on her thigh. “But you still have me. And when you dream of falling, I promise I’ll help you fly.”

“Someone’s been spending time with the poets,” she says and smiles, clucks him gently under the chin. “And I’ll catch you if you fly into a glass window.”

“Once,” he says dismissively, flaps his wings in a parody of a shrug. Then, serious again if a little too prideful, “I think we can fix them. They’re better because we’re here, which means we’re doing the right thing.”

Nile isn’t sure she has the bone deep certainty of her daemon, but she isn’t as entangled in history as Andy: she can still see the points where her interference helped them, saved them. And doing good, that’s all she wanted. Chris speaks in unison with her when the next thought emerges “Let’s call Copley again.”

\--

Days turn into one month before Nile realizes what’s happening. The others don’t seem particularly concerned about time. Quynh and Joe will revisit the same piece of poetry over several days, lingering on word choices and switching arguments until Nile can’t even remember who found the piece first. On one particularly raucous evening, Joe had bet Booker that he couldn’t crack a coconut open with his forehead, and Booker had countered that he could eat the fruit whole faster than Joe. Nile had left them sprawled in the sand side by side, clutching their stomachs.

Nicky sets up a Go board that looks nearly identical after a week.

“Are you guys even using this thing,” Nile asks, reaches down to touch one of the smooth markers.

Nicky jumps up, hands outstretched. “Be careful, please! I have just made my move and if you disrupt the board Andy will make us start over.”

Andy, walking past in the hallway, shouts, “I’m going to beat you in two hundred moves, Niccolo, gird your loins.”

“We play traditionally,” Nicky explains and lets his fingers ghost over a white piece tenderly. “Twenty-four hours a move, advice accepted from onlookers along with the mockery of your opponent for your lack of tactical skill.”

“I’ll stick to checkers,” Nile drawls flatly. Two hundred moves, one a day. She’s never had a vacation longer than two weeks, and her companions are stretching out a board game past a half year.

She tries to acclimatize to their pace. She braids and rebraids her hair for hours, tries some of the more complex YouTube looks that she’s never had the patience to sit through before. She prints off articles about PTSD and leaves them tucked in the leaves of whatever Quynh and Booker happen to be reading. She digs into Joe’s inexplicable Danielle Steel collection and reads twenty romance novels in a row.

Her birthday dawns bright and sunny. Chris is singing happy birthday in mangled German, bobbing himself side to side in the smug pleasure of being an annoyance. Nile waves a hand to disrupt him and then stretches slowly without sitting up. She’s aware of the places where her muscles should be fatigued or tight even though she might as well be walking off two weeks of rest days.

The first birthday had been hard. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone and she figured without Booker, none of them would think to look up that kind of information for a celebration. It was obvious they’d known from the way they steered clear of her instinctively all day, Joe and Nicky loudly announcing that they were going to the Kafka museum and Andy claiming she needed a day off from training because of a headache. Nile had sat on the balcony with her arms around herself, tears coming and going as the sun moved across the sky.

Still, before bed she’d found a small and poorly wrapped package at her door. A notebook, neatly embossed with an eagle on its cover, and three photos inside: the image of her father in uniform, Nile with her mom and brother at their last Fourth of July picnic, and one she hasn’t seen before: her brother’s graduation. It hurt to look at, and she flipped the page roughly. And there was a detailed sketch of Chris riding Party into battle, not taken from life and with enough features exaggerated that it drew a laugh out of her. The next day, she’d approached Nicky and Joe to hug them, stayed in the warm circle of their arms until Andy had announced it was time to practice her judo throws.

Nile’s collected birthdays since then, and every time they let her set the pace and intensity. She’s had Klepon in Bali instead of sprinkles cake, and cleaned ducks after an oil spill on the coast of Canada. Mostly, it’s the day they let her decide entirely what to do for herself, coming up with more elaborate excuses for leaving her alone as soon as they realize it makes her smile.

Today, she thinks, can be a day just like the last few weeks. She’ll lay on the beach until someone brings her a Corona, until she can feel each grain of sand against the backs of her knees and the heat of the sun warms her to melting. Maybe she’ll nap. Probably, she’ll cry for her mom for a bit but the salt of the tears is indistinguishable from beach life.

The open living room is draped carefully with bunting. Nile feels her stomach drop but bullies herself through to the table, which is also piled festively with French toast and waffles.

“Happy birthday to the National Geographic magazine,” Andy drawls and tips a mimosa glass that’s barely the palest orange at her.

“And to Shams al-Dīn Abū Al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad Ibn Muḥammad Ibn Khallikān,” Nicky adds and lifts his own glass in a toast.

“What, I thought we were celebrating The Treaty of Basel,” Joe yells in exaggerated outrage, chucking a berry at Andy. She catches it and eats it without looking.

“I would like to remember that today a woman tried to assassinate an American president,” Quynh intones solemnly and sets a full plate in front of Nile as she sinks cautiously to the table.

“What are you guys up to?” she asks.

“Just celebrating, you know, random things,” Booker says casually. The mimosa he puts in front of her is in a red wine glass and garnished with fresh oranges. He smirks at her when she gives him an unimpressed look. “We finally have something to celebrate, don’t we.”

“And a full day planned,” Andy manages to make it sound like a warning. “It’s time for you to learn to ride a horse.”

Party sticks his nose over the balcony, “Don’t worry, I have a very steady gait.”

“You guys,” Nile says cautiously.

“It’s just good to know how to ride a horse,” Andy continues, giving Nile space to breathe by looking away. “You never know when these newfangled automobiles are going to go out of fashion, right?”

Party also has streamers woven into his mane and makes her admire them for five minutes before he sets off at a slow walk. Nile had never thought she’d ride a horse, that was something other girls did. Here she is, unaging on her birthday riding a millennia-old daemon horse along a picturesque beach.

She mostly holds on while Party sets the pace, but it’s easy enough to see how his gait and her seat affect each other and by the time they’re back Nile is grinning and urging him on. Her new family cheers her on raucously as she makes it back to the porch, still steady in the saddle.

Booker vanishes just before lunch, returning with a smirk and Baudelaire uncharacteristically excitable, running besides him. “Good timing,” he says when Nile’s stomach rumbles. “I thought we’d have a special American tradition for lunch.”

“Oh, is this going to be bad?” Nile asks. Booker sweeps his arm to gesture her around the corner, where there is a table piled high with chicken wings.

“Okay, actually pretty cool,” she says.

“I ordered in plenty of sauces,” Booker says, still with uncharacteristic excitement. He sits Nile down at the table and then turns and points at Joe. “Including a special one to decide an old conversation.”

Andy laughs and slaps a stack of bills down on an empty plate. “This should be good.”

“Better than the first time we had Hakarl?” Quynh asks doubtfully. Booker lobs the container at her and she takes a careful sniff, recoiling and blinking furiously at the spice. “I see.”

“At least as entertaining,” Andy assures her.

“I’ll go with Booker,” Quynh decides. “He looks like he’s been practicing.”

“I’ll take Joe,” Nile offers.

“Rookie mistake,” Andy says smugly as the three men sit on the other side of the table. Booker dramatically uses tongs to portion out the wings. He and Joe jostle each other and Nicky stops serving himself from the salad bowl and picks up his first wing.

Then they start. Nile watches the first bead of sweat trickle free of Booker’s hairline. Next to him, Joe groans and rubs his face against his shoulder to wipe away the tears on his cheeks. They’re glaring at each other intensely, struggling to swallow bites as fast as they can.

Nicky neatly finishes his second wing and picks up a third.

Baudelaire is twisting miserably by Booker’s feet, face half submerged in a bowl of water. As Booker and Joe, tied neck and neck, fumble for their second wings, Miriam slumps down and whimpers pathetically. Zipphora has had her paws over her eyes since the sauce was revealed, hunching her shoulders deeper.

“Are you guys okay?” Nile asks.

“Great,” Joe grits.

“I could do this all day,” Booker agrees. They’re both turning beet-red, the colour spreading from their damp temples down past the collars of their shirts. Nile props a thoughtful head in her hand and studies them.

“Okay, because you don’t look great,” she says finally. They glare at her, then back at each other. She notices their bites getting smaller, the pauses between growing longer and punctuated by gasps and groans.

Nicky licks his fingers methodically and reaches for the bottle of hot sauce by Quynh’s hand. “Do you mind?”

The women mutely shake their heads as Booker bangs his head down on the table, a nearly whole wing in his grip. He waves a hand in surrender and Joe forces down enough bites to clean his own wing to the bone before pushing himself back from the table, swearing emphatically.

“You all done, Joe?” Nicky asks, and when neither answers he tips the remaining wings from both of their plates into the place in front of them, adds another drizzle of hot sauce, and continues eating methodically.

“I beat you,” Joe manages after he’s chugged a glass of milk. “You lose again, Booker.”

Booker swears creatively in response from his position on the ground next to the table, and does not move an arm from across his eyes.

“Never bet against Nicky,” Andy says as she hauls her winnings in. “I once saw him eat that maggoty cheese from Sardinia spread on hard-tac.”

The conversation devolves comfortably from there, spinning through the worst meals in history and then pivoting towards the stupidest risks each has taken. Andy mercilessly re-enacts the low points of Booker and Joe’s careers for Nile and Quynh, both too preoccupied to contradict the time in which she insists they both lost a fight to an alligator. Nicky, when he’s finished his food and moved on to his salad without breaking a sweat, reminds Andy of the time she’d nearly fallen off a castle wall trying to impress Elisabeth of Bavaria.

Nile realizes, suddenly and with a rush of pleasure, that she’s not just the audience for this conversation. “So, we were in Iran, helping to retrieve and evacuate civilians after the last big earthquake and Joe thinks he remembers a shortcut that’ll get us to the extraction point faster,” she begins.

Andy slings an arm around her shoulders and squeezes affectionately as Nile launches into the harrowing escape and run-in with the angriest grandmother in all seven continents.

Later, when Booker and Joe have recovered enough to defend their honour and she’s had a perfect two hour nap in the sun, she stretches out next to Nicky in a hammock and watches the now-normal roughhousing at the waterline. Just loud enough to be heard over the sound of the waves, she whispers, “Thanks.”

“It’s not every day we celebrate the founding of one of the most important modern magazines in English exploration,” he agrees and winks at her. “But if you liked this, perhaps we can find another fall of a monarchy or medical discovery to celebrate next year.”

“I’d like that.”

Her fondness for their carefully planned events coasts her through another few days. The horseback riding helps. Nile is motivated by a flawless display of riding tricks from Andy and a promise that Nile too can try if she just remembers to start off on the correct foot. Joe continues her sword training, which seems to largely consist of him criticizing her posture and cycling through a series of increasingly obscure blades to find “just the right one.” Nile, in turn, teaches Quynh seven TikTok dances and how to tell a fake handbag from a real one. There are moments when she laughs. There are also moments when she itches under her skin to move, to do something real.

Every time she calls Copley, he says to wait. “I’m keeping an eye out on the perfect mission, I know what all of you can do. But for now, you need to heal.”

“I literally can heal my body from beyond the point of death,” she grouses. “I was a Mar—“

“A Marine, we know,” Catley sighs into the microphone loudly. She sounds closer than Copley, which means the asshole has put her on speakerphone so he can keep working, again. Nile feels a surge of resentment that he’s allowed to work when all she can do is paint Booker and Joe’s toenails when they fall asleep watching football reruns.

“But you’ve all been through difficult things, in your own ways,” Copley picks the thread back up. “Andromache almost stopped fighting due to it. Quynh is still trying to find her place in the twenty-first century.”

“You’ll call, as soon as something comes up.”

“Of course. Now go have some fun. Drink rum from a coconut, get stung by a jellyfish.”

Leave me alone, Nile can hear unspoken. She hangs up and lobs the phone at her bed. The bounce of the mattress wakes Chris up. “Run?” he suggests. Nile wriggles into a sports bra and opens the door to let him out into another fucking day in paradise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nile Freeman - Christopher, golden eagle  
> Andromache the Scythian - Party Horse, known officially as Partitavus the horse.  
> Booker - Baudelaire (red fox)  
> Joe & Nicky - Zipphora (lioness) and Miriam (wolf)  
> Copley - unnamed cat, aka Catley.  
> Quynh - Thủy Tinh (king cobra)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Somehow, several missions go worse than Nile could have expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So a delightful reader noticed that I had tagged this fic as F/F, F/M. THIS IS FALSE. If you want heterosexual romance, I'm sorry but you should gently reverse your vehicle. As previous chapters have demonstrated, I should have coded it F/F, M/M.
> 
> Content warning: this chapter features the off-screen death of a child. If you want to avoid this section stop at "There are only three children eating breakfast when Nile emerges." and rejoin us at "They’ve trailed off into silence by the time they’re at the facility Copley had identified."

Their first mission with the new, full team is a disaster. Nile doesn’t use the word gently, there are some big things going on in the world right now and some pretty significant new shit in her personal life. But Copley throws them what he obviously thinks is a softball, just a recovery mission with the uncomfortable potential for a high body count because, of course, the targeted technology is in the middle of a territorial dispute between rival gangs.

It’s strange to have six instead of four, to have Booker fighting with her for only the second time in her life. Training gave them clues about how it might be different. Nile has grown accustomed to being Andy’s default shield, if only because she’s the only one not trying to break centuries of habits. Andy usually leaves Party behind, given the inconveniences of horses and stairways, and always takes point. Joe and Nicky sweep one flank and fight like their daemons, rotating around their shared axis and finishing each other’s kills as Zipphora launches herself into backs and Miriam harries legs. It’s left Nile accustomed to watching the bigger picture, Chris steering her from a vantage point above so she can block shots on Andy and take out anyone smart enough to stay out of the way of the hand-held weapons.

On vacation in basically paradise, surrounded by a group that tends to shift between group lounging and splitting into a multitude of well-worn, comfortable combinations, she had relaxed. It had been strange but pleasant to have Booker back and to learn about Quynh. Andy’s anger at Booker had burned out before Merrick was even dead, and Joe drifted between brotherly teasing and uncomfortable silences in a manageable way. Nile had forgotten Nicky. She can’t be the first person to make that mistake, admittedly, but she should have known better.

Metaphorically trapped between Booker and Nicky as the other three scope the site, she thinks back. Nicky hadn’t made a big deal of his anger, not when they agreed on the banishment or when he’d walked out or when Andy had insisted they come together again. But his eyes skated off Booker like glass, and even when they were side by side in a room Nicky was unflinchingly flat and restrained.

“I’ll take point,” she murmurs when Joe gives them the signal. “Nicky, then Booker.”

And Nicky scoffs very quietly.

“Nicky, come on,” Booker says. There’s more desperation than resignation in his voice.

“I will take the rear,” Nicky says to Nile. She looks between him and Booker and Miriam, ears set back low against her skull. They don’t have time to protest, and she couldn’t ever say she doesn’t trust Nicky to watch her back.

“We’re talking about it later,” she says and starts around the corner. Booker is easy enough to figure out in combat, anyway, he’s the only one who can be trusted to keep hold of his gun for an entire fight, though he shifts between shooting and using it and his body as a battering ram. She thought she knew what to expect from Quynh, too. She is very wrong. When they train, Quynh fights smooth and slow, smile on her face and maybe a little too likely to draw blood. In the field, it’s like watching a gory movie on fast forward. Quynh is unflinching and hungry for someone else to feel a moment of pain.

So, the mission is a disaster from the moment Andy tells them what to do because Quynh does not follow instructions. The result is a success in name only, they retrieve the target but Nile is shot in the neck (embarrassing and inconvenient), Nicky is knocked two stories off a collapsing building, and the falling rubble also pins and crushes Booker’s leg. And, considering they are all capable of healing, they get a better deal than any of the people who came in Quynh’s radius. Nile remembers the feral rage from her earliest dreams, the energy that she thought had seeped out into the warm ocean over the months of their recovery.

Andy is briskly efficient as she shepherds them onto the boat to escape down river. She’s quiet until it’s only jungle surrounding them, the sound of late night bugs and their own forced-slow breathing, and then she whirls on Quynh. “What the fuck was that?"

Quynh doesn’t look up from where she’s meticulously polishing her blade clean. “I believe it’s called a _fight_ , Andromache. Do you remember those?”

“You could have got us all killed. You did get _Nile_ killed.”

“She got better.” Quynh shrugs with a lazy roll of her shoulders. “That’s how we used to do it. I remember you well, soaked in blood in the middle of a battlefield."

“It’s different now,” Joe says flatly. Quynh looks from him to Nicky, resting with his back propped against Zipphora, and rolls her eyes so hard Nile’s mom would say they were about to pop right out of her head. “We don’t do that any more, it isn’t just about the kill count. You were reckless.”

“We also got your silly little piece of technology.” Quynh isn’t rising to the tension in Joe’s voice. Nile can see now why Andy had made him take the wheel, he’s just responsible enough not to abandon his post for the fight he’s clearly ready to have.

“Quynh,” Andy says low and furious. “To the back.”

Nile sits carefully next to Booker and stretches her legs out in front of her. Quynh and Andy have switched to a language she’s not sure she could even identify, vacillating from tense whispers to shouts and pushes.

“It’s for the best that they have this discussion,” Nicky says. Nile had been sure he was asleep, but on a second glance she can see the glint from the whites of his eyes. “Would be lovely if they had it in a place with hot food, but it needs to be done.”

“You can tell what they’re saying?” Nile asks. It’s not that she wants to eavesdrop, she just wants to _know_.

Nicky smiles at her, then up at Joe. “No, but I recognize the sound. They used to fight like cats when they couldn’t agree on a plan, and Andy has become very unfamiliar with people questioning her instructions.”

“I give her shit all the time,” Joe says, but even if his words are protesting his tone is agreement.

“As long as we don’t have to retrieve them in pieces from an alligator’s stomach, I don’t care,” Booker mutters. Nile shifts so she can lean her head on his shoulder, feels his settle on top of hers after a second’s hesitation.

“They always decide that being together is the correct decision,” Nicky says with finality. “And, even if they have apologized for the past, there is still much to be discussed.”

“Speaking of apologies,” Joe says with the falsely casual cheer he uses when he’s announcing he’s used the last of Nile’s lotion and will be getting her more later in the day.

“He’s right, Nicky,” Booker says. “I do need to apologize. We can’t keep— ”

Nicky doesn’t open his eyes or straighten to sit up right. He asks, “Where do you think we would be by now, had Nile not come back for Andy?”

Nile has worked pretty hard at not figuring it out. Joe can’t fake his smile any more, silently adjusting his grip on the wheel as he hunches down.

“Nicky, I made the worst choice I could have—“

“I think,” Nicky says with the same casual thoughtfulness, “that eventually they would have found a team of staff rather than just their doctor. I think they would realize that it is easier to control a variable if there is only one subject in a room.”

Nile hears a broken, quiet noise from Joe. Booker is tensely silent, staring at Nicky. The pause stretches out and then Nicky opens his eyes, looking directly at Booker for the first time since Nile’s first dinner with the family. “I think that, if Nile had not come, I still would not be in a position to speak to you right now. Perhaps you should finally fucking be glad for what you do have.”

“Nicolo,” Joe whispers, soft and gentle. Nicky doesn’t speak again, just smooths a hand down Zipphora’s side with his usual careful affection and closes his eyes again. Nile tries not to hold her breath, but neither she nor Booker can uncoil from their tension.

Andy and Quynh have subsided into frustrated silence by the time they make landing, choose separate cars for the second leg of the trip and nearly come to blows on the airstrip. Then the tension breaks like a stormfront: Quynh says something that makes Andy laugh, Andy squeezes her arm and then pulls her in tightly so they’re side to side. Nile dozes off to the sound of their conversation and Booker’s rhythmic snoring before the plane has levelled off on its way to their next safehouse.

It takes more time to grow comfortable with the shifting balance of power. Andy concedes to splitting the team several times, sending Nile out with Joe and Nicky while she, Booker and Quynh work through their frustrations and find a way to work together. The split missions are easier because Nicky is, as before, happy with any permutation provided it doesn’t involve conversation with Booker.

The next mission is different, better. Nile can see the beauty of Quynh’s anger, sweeps left when Booker goes right. None of them die, and Joe insists on buying cookies on the way home to celebrate. The time after that, Nile feels resettled in her skin, resigned to Nicky’s quiet retreat into himself and Booker’s knife-edged balanced guilt.

Given the range of quality in their mission sites, Nile is surprised to find that a sterile room is now what makes her skin crawl. Every busted lab reminds her of being shot in the back as she stumbled into the room where her new family was strapped down, the way that scientist had lunged for her neck with the syringe. Their current mission plays to type, if trending to a little more smoke and gas than she’d prefer.

Chris is up in the rafters, pecking at the wiring to see if he can disable any of the machines around them. Nile had begged him not to get shocked and die. She’s not sure if he can die, given that he doesn’t stay vanished when he does, but doing something stupid definitely seems like the way her daemon would go.

Joe emerges from the basement entrance where he and Andy had moved ahead. He has his bloody sword in his left hand and a small child balanced on his right hip.

“Did you steal a baby,” Nile yells. She’s seen weirder. Who knows what kind of present Joe thinks is appropriate for an anniversary with Nicky.

“Funny, kid,” he says. “Basement cleared. Four nonhostiles, this is the littlest. Andy is leading the rest up, they’re in rough shape.”

“Upstairs is clear and empty,” Quynh announces from just behind Nile and to the left. Nile, who is very fucking well trained, does not jump.

“No vehicles approaching. It looks like Christopher did manage to kill the alarm wire before it transmitted,” Nicky adds. He looks up from the scope of his rifle and his face relaxes into a grin. He gentles his tone as he slouches down to the child’s level, murmurs, “Hello there, little one. Do you have a name?”

The child bangs her head down on Joe’s shoulder but maintains sullen eye contact with Nicky. He brushes her hair away from her cheek gently and keeps speaking in an encouraging voice.

“Charges ready,” Booker says, pointedly walking past Joe and Nicky and their biological ticking clock to join Nile and Quynh by the stairs. “Miri and Zipphora are in the truck, Party is headed to the rendezvous site. I’ll help Andy with the last of the kids.”

Nicky takes Joe’s sword and cleans it absent-mindedly, still chattering at the small silent child as Nile moves around them to take point on their exit. He was right, of course, the yard is empty except for the corpses and at any rate, he still has his finger resting parallel to the trigger, ready to aim again.

“We don’t have a car seat,” she groans as she climbs into the driver’s seat. “You guys barely use _seatbelts_ , and it’s illegal not to have a kid in a backwards facing carseat.”

“I think that we may have bigger problems,” Quynh says. “I did not see any brands on that equipment, any hard copies of data. I fear that we have only plugged a hole in the dam, rather than turned the tide.”

Her hand drifts up to Thủy Tinh, who brushes himself along under her jaw and darts back under the curtain of her hair. Nile closes her eyes and thinks back hard, but Quynh is right. Unlabeled, unnamed. Liquids in the glassware, but every single hard drive smashed by the time they’d breached the entrance.

“Shit,” she sighs, dragging the syllable out.

“Shit,” says the small child in a wavery, piping voice. Nile shoots a panicked look at Quynh, who bites her lip and leans forward as if that disguises the way she’s started laughing.

“Nile! Language!” Joe gasps.

Nicky shakes the child’s small fist gently. “Well done. How good at speaking you are.”

Booker is also carrying a child when he leaves the building. Andy has a firm grasp on the other two. The older girl can’t be much older than ten, and is shooting resentful looks up at Andy and periodically trying to shrug out of her grip. The other is crying wetly, clutching a stuffed dog to his chest, five at the most. Nile seeks out Booker’s eyes, wanting to offer silent reassurance to her friend. His youngest died at forty-two, she thinks. He balances his toddler at least as comfortably as Joe, but when he looks up at her he shakes his head once, quick and sharp.

The toddler has knotted grimy fingers in Baudelaire’s fur. Nile does a double take, and then methodically examines each of the weary children as they’re helped or lifted through the sliding door of the van. Daemons can be small, she thinks. A mouse hiding in a pocket, a snake that looks just like a stupid piece of rope on a horse’s neck. But she meets the haunted eyes of the eleven year old and certainty chills her down to the core.

“Where are their daemons,” she asks.

Andy doesn’t look at her, just keeps staring at the kids like they’ll vanish in front of her. All she says is, “Move out.”

The drive to their nearest safe house is silent. A look in the rearview mirror shows that Andy, as usual, has taken the opportunity to stretch out blocking the door and fall asleep. The middle child with his grimy toy has crept closer to Joe, Nicky, and the baby and carefully, carefully sat between them. He droops closer to sleep every time Nile checks until he’s draped in a position that can’t be comfortable over Nicky’s folded legs, curled both sideways to rest and in on himself in an instinctively protective posture. Booker and Baudelaire are still entangled with the other child, and the oldest—When Nile catches her eye she’s startled by the unrestrained loathing on the young face.

The child tries to make a break for it again when they pull up to the ramshackle house, is caught by Andy again and slung over her shoulder. Joe tries assurances in a series of languages to no effect, and then Quynh marches over and adopts a stance that reminds Nile of a predator in wait.

“You care for the other children, don’t you,” she says levelly. The girl gives her a resentful look but stops struggling. Quynh nods sharply. “You won’t stay with us. But if you leave us now, where will you go? Who will help you.”

Everyone else makes a point of looking busy unloading equipment and opening windows to air. Finally, the girl announces, “Put me down.” Nile can tell that Andy likes her attitude, because she deposits her on her feet instead of her butt. The girl flips her hair over her shoulder and thrusts out a hand to shake. “I’m Ava.”

“Hello, Ava,” Quynh says solemnly and squeezes her hand firmly. “I look forward to your information about that facility. My name is Quynh.”

Ava briskly wipes the drying snot off the five-year-old’s face with the edge of her shirt and leads him inside. They’re wilting fast with the post-adrenaline fatigue, barely making their way through their granola bars and glasses of water before they start spending more time with their eyes closed than open.

Nile keeps watch for any child daemons, the motions or tiny voices that would indicate that these children just have engrained caution around strangers. All she can confirm is that each child looks washed out, not in the starved or frightened way like in other missions, but fundamentally lacking in some of the colour and energy of childhood.

Many of the safehouses had two rooms, remnants from the two hundred years before Nile when just-enough privacy was a deciding factor in the space. Nicer than a cave, less good than an actual house. At any rate, they bunk all the children down in the bigger room, piling the bed with pillows to stop them from rolling and blankets every time a child twitches or shivers. The kid had refused to release Baudelaire even as he fell asleep, so Booker sits with his back against the closed door when the rest of them drop onto the furniture to discuss.

“Honestly, I expected there to be more guns,” Andy admits, studying her hands closely. “It feels like something is up, maybe we caught them in the middle of a transfer.”

Joe, on the floor leaning back against Nicky’s legs and with an arm draped over Zipphora, nods his agreement. “It was like they’d gone through with a sledgehammer before we got there. They even burned the shredded paper.”

“Are none of y’all going to say it,” Nile says flatly. No one looks at her so she forges on. “These kids don’t have daemons.”

“People can’t live without daemons, Nile,” Nicky says softly. “I’ve seen a man separated from his daemon, and they just both... fade.”

“Zombies,” Joe supplies neatly. “For the short term, anyway.”

“I know what I saw,” Nile says flatly. She knows what she _felt_ , more importantly. Like she should never let go of Chris again, like she needed to get _away_. Worse than the first time she’d seen Booker without Baudelaire, sprawled in the armchair with his guts on display.

“Nile is right,” Quynh says. “We saw nothing to contain a daemon—no cages, no chains. The children asked for nothing when we left.”

Booker rubs his collarbone, right where Baudelaire usually rests her head. “They were lonely.”

“So what do we do,” she pushes on, folds her hands together in front of her. “Nicky, what did you guys do when you saw men separated from their daemons? How did you fix it.”

Joe’s head tips back to make eye contact, but Nicky looks away first—From Joe, and from all of them. “I never saw it fixed,” he admits.

“Nicky,” Joe says softly.

“Jerusalem,” Quynh says. “News of the atrocities spread quickly. They said the Christians destroyed Jew and Muslim alike in their mad quest.”

“And sometimes they—we did worse,” Nicky agrees. “There are always men who see the game in having power over another. I never.”

Nile knows Nicky well enough to know how he meant to end the sentence. Not defending himself with “I never did it,” but carrying the shame of “I never stopped it.” Joe wraps his hand around Nicky’s foot, squeezes gently but doesn’t speak. The silence is heavy until Nicky draws in a deep breath, looks back at her.

“There were stories, things you could do other than force them apart. Knives so sharp that they could cut an angel’s wing, or slice a soul from a body. And when those severed returned without their souls, they were like ghosts among the living.”

“You think someone cut these kids’ daemons away,” Andy says quietly. “I rarely saw such things. After the daemon settled, the only way to banish evil spirits from the skull was trepanning. It worked, sometimes. Maybe it’s like that.”

Quynh’s hand spasms tight around Thủy Tinh. “We believed if a person died away from home, away from their family, who are not honoured on the family altar or buried in known ground, would continue to walk the earth.”

“Definitely fucking away from home,” Booker growls. He kneads a palm over his eyes. “Did any of you see what happened to the _daemons_ after? Is it just like when the daemon goes before their—person?”

Nile shuts her eyes and can see Joe and Nicky in all their permutations, alone with blood and without daemons. “We can keep going without them, for a bit. And these kids—we have to try and help them.”

“Of course we do,” Nicky agrees, shifting like he’s actively turning away from the past and back to their room in the moment. “Of course there must be research on these things, achieved by good or evil means.”

Andy’s eyes light up and she stands. “Then we start by finding the waypoint. Get Copley on it, and when the kids wake up tomorrow we can ask them what they know about the tests and the transfer. Sometimes people forget that little ears are listening. Until then, rest up.”

Booker starts typing at his phone immediately and Quynh silently heads into the unoccupied bedroom. Nile starts to leverage herself up out of the chair and pauses.

“I just need a moment,” Nicky promises Joe and heads for the door. Andy leans back hard and sighs and Joe scrubs a hand over his face, smoothing his beard down. Nile looks between them and Nicky’s receding back, and follows him out into the night. She hesitates for a minute before joining him on the stoop, keeping her gaze forward.

“We don’t have to talk,” she says when the silence stretches. “I just know I’d want someone to be out here with me if I was feeling like shit.”

Nicky laughs hoarsely, leans back to prop himself up on his arms. “I’ll be fine. It’s important to remember your mistakes, so you know that each time you make the right choice, the _good_ choice—It’s still worth it.”

She touches her cross once, lightly. “Is this why you guys don’t believe?”

He sighs, tilts his head back until his neck is stretched taut. “Everyone believes something, Nile. I have just… learned to focus my belief on God, rather than his instruments on earth. Every person in the church is one voice trying to decide what God would have them do. I don’t see the need to listen to another’s voice when I can be patient and wait for him instead.”

“Does he ever,” Nile starts cautiously. “I mean, do you hear him?”

“Would it be horrible poetry to say that I hear him when you laugh, or when Booker tries to sing?” He slants a grin at her, teasing. “No. I don’t know. I always feared that only saints spoke to God, and I am not one of those. Being in silence and waiting is enough for me. If you want to talk to God with someone, you should ask Joe.”

“I didn’t know he prayed.”

Nicky’s shoulders roll in a shrug. “He believes. He talks. After a while, I started thinking perhaps his people were better than mine at truly behaving like Christians. Certainly for a while they were kinder rulers. But Joe has found his own way to make peace with faith. When we were born, you couldn’t be without it. We will always have it, I think, but we can shape it to be part of the best of us.”

He looks a bit like an effigy in an old church, light from inside picking out the line of his nose and throwing his eyes into darkness. Nile touches her cross again, then his hand. It’s not stone under her fingers, still gives under pressure.

“Why don’t you sleep,” he suggests. “I’ll be in soon enough.”

Nile returns inside. Joe is still seated on the floor, watching the door from his position next to the couch. He reaches up as she passes and they squeeze hands, quickly and firmly. Booker remains by the door to the children’s room, snuffling in his sleep with his head propped up on the doorframe. She gets her outer layers off, but doesn’t bother to struggle with the sports bra or boxers before she curls up on top of the covers. She prays.

\--

There are only three children eating breakfast when Nile emerges. The two toddlers are eating sloppily, spilling as much of the cereal onto Miriam at their feet as they get into their mouths. Ava is pushing cheerios around her bowl with her head propped on her fist. Her eyes are puffy and her cheeks are shiny with tear tracks. Compared to yesterday, they seem even more grey and withdrawn.

Nile turns to Joe, propped up against the counter and glassy-eyed himself. He nods sharply at the bedroom’s closed door. The door opens silently at her touch and she sees Andy seated crosslegged by the window, watching the bed intently. Nicky has one of the medical kits they’d stocked all the safe houses with, when they thought that Andy was out of time. The five year old boy has a thermometer tucked inside his mouth, which is open slack.

“What’s going on,” she asks very quietly, like she’s in a sick room. She _is_ suddenly in a sick room.

“William didn’t respond when Ava tried to wake him this morning,” Nicky says in Italian. Nile has figured out enough of the language to keep up, by now. In this case, it’s better than saying something one of the kids might understand. “No fever, no change in his pulse.”

Nile sinks to her knees next to the bed, folds her hands around one of the boy’s small, lax fingers. “So you don’t know what it is, then?”

“I do.” He has the same pained face as last night. “I had hoped that the separation was recent, but everyone reacts differently to the loss.”

Nile thinks briefly of her childhood, running in one direction as Chris had gone the other until they hit the wall where it started to hurt, to feel like something was missing. William doesn’t respond when she squeezes his hand. The stuffed dog, battered and missing patches of fur, rises and falls slowly where it’s been rested on William’s stomach.

“You have to do something,” she says, hears her voice crack. “Nicky, there has to be something you can do.”

He watches her levelly for a long moment, then looks back down and gently brushes William’s fringe off his face. Andy speaks from her position against the wall, voice firm as any commanding officer. “Nile, go help Booker get ready. Copley said he’d have something for us within the hour, I want to be ready to roll out.”

She doesn’t want to leave, but there’s also nothing she and Chris need as desperately as to get out of that room. Nile eases the door shut, unable to look up at Joe, and goes outside to help Booker check over their guns. Joe comes out next, helping load the toddlers into seats in the back. It’s not safe to leave them behind, not when they seem to be wasting away without their daemons and no one knows how long they have. Quynh brings Ava out next, straps in next to her and takes the girl’s hand with uncharacteristic softness.

Then the safehouse door opens and Nicky, hoodie up over his face and hand clenching and releasing on the hilt of his sword, takes the shotgun seat. Nile draws in an unsteady breath and almost misses Andy locking the door behind them. Andy gets into the driver’s seat and, with the same unusual level of care that Quynh is showing, eases them into drive and back on the road.

Nile’s eyes fill and overflow in the silence. Ava screams once, shrill and agonized, when the house falls out of sight and the realization hits her. It feels selfish to grab Chris but she can’t help herself, closes her fingers over his talons and holds on tight where he’s balanced on her shoulder against the window. Behind her, Joe starts to speak quietly in Arabic. The cadence sinks under Nile’s skin, echoes of her childhood and of Afghanistan. She lowers her head, grits her teeth, and whispers, “Hail Mary, full of grace.”

They’ve trailed off into silence by the time they’re at the facility Copley had identified. Nile scrubs at her eyes once and then pulls the door open and climbs out ahead of Booker. Joe has gathered the children up between him and Zipphora, telling stories to cover the way he’s shifted to act as a human shield. Nicky swings himself onto the van’s roof, sprawling low with his rifle tucked against his cheek. It’s not the first time they’ve split the team, but combined with the uncomfortable _everything_ about this situation, Nile almost doesn’t want to leave them behind.

The guards and scientists absent from the last site have all congregated in this one. Nile knows enough of Quynh’s tactics now to aim her first few shots wide, driving the soldiers within reach of the labrys and sword. More than a few of the scientists die, too, either pushed in the way by panicking guards or determined to have their own blaze-of-glory moment.

Andy trips and pins one of the last with her foot, rests the labrys so the bloody blade occupies most of the woman’s peripheral vision. The woman’s gray squirrel daemon is huddled against her neck trembling and she tells them everything they need to know and more before Andy has even asked the first question.

The new knowledge is almost exclusively as discomforting as the implication from their mission to rescue the children. Past the jargon and the justifications, what Nile hears is this: these children are less important than some abstract _potential_ for a future that looks the way the scientists want. They think that they’re not only above the law, but past common sense or morality. Torture is permissible. William’s quiet death is an acceptable cost.

Nile doesn’t believe in killing prisoners, would save the life of someone who tried to kill her even before she knew she would bounce back from it. But this, in this moment. She questions.

But Nicky had said to make the good choice, even through the pain of a millennium-old choice that he could have justified like so many assholes after him have. So Nile walks up, rests her hand on Andy’s elbow.

“She can be the first piece of evidence in the case,” she says and tucks her handgun back into her waistband. “We have international humanitarian laws for just this reason. We can only kill her once, but teenagers can shame her with a meme that will be forever engrained in the cultural consciousness.”

Booker lets out a low, impressed whistle at the choice. Andy slides the labrys briefly closer to the woman’s face, just enough that there’s a thin line of her colleague’s blood vertical across her cheek. Then she nods. Nile props her hands on her hips and breathes deeply while Booker and Quynh confirm the rest of the rooms are empty, and then they leave the woman hog-tied under a table and continue on to the locked steel door at the back. Her code opens it, which is a good indication that she’s not a liar as well as a living monster.

Inside, the wall is lined with ten small cages, solid and chunky like safes but with the doors exposed grids of some kind of alloy instead of steel. Andy has a gun out, studying the space as a whole, so Nile is the first to the wall to look inside. The first three she looks in are empty, not even a scrap of bedding or fur or feathers to indicate they were once occupied. In the fourth, curled up in the corner with its sides fluttering with tiny rapid breaths, is a very small dormouse daemon.

Nile raps on the cage very gently until it cracks open one glassly black eye. “I’m here from Ava and the little ones,” she says. The daemon tries to stand and then collapses back in on itself, shivering hard. Nile hauls her jacket off and scoops up the daemon as gently as she can, holding it like her jacket is a hammock so even the pressure of her hands won’t disturb it. Beside her, Booker slams the grip of his gun hard against two more cage clasps and opens both cages hard enough that the doors bounce and rattle at the extent of their swings. He deposits a young robin, old enough to have lost the dinosaur boniness of a new chick but still so _small_ , into the cradle of Nile’s jacket and the two daemons huddle together immediately. The last daemon looks a bit like a cat, but when it’s also settled Nile realizes that it’s a skunk kit.

They’re not translucent but they feel like they _should_ be, like something in the back of her mind says these daemons are less real than Chris or Thủy Tinh or any of the daemons of strangers that she’s passed in the street. And though it may be the fatigue that stops them from flipping forms like most children’s daemons she knows, there is also a terrible permanence to the three tiny animals.

Ava has shaken herself free of Joe and is running towards them from the truck when Nile emerges into the sunlight. She crashes into Nile hard, crying again already, and fumbles the chick from the jacket, clutching it to her cheek, before she sinks in a heap to the ground. The two toddlers are also crying hard when she offers the daemons up to them, sees the skunk arch against the grubby palm of one and the dormouse scramble up the sleeve of the other. She avoids looking at Joe so she doesn’t cry, just carefully puts her jacket back on as Booker and Andy drag their new hostage-cum-witness out to the trunk.

“Copley will meet us at the airport,” he says. He’s got his shades on anyways, but he also tilts his head so he’s speaking to the horizon as much as her. “Without names for the kids he’s having a hard time matching them to missing persons. It’s a big country.”

A big country that lets children go missing every day, Nile thinks. Their parents might not even be allowed to enter them into a database that Copley can access.

“We can’t keep them,” Andy says firmly. She looks at Nile first and must accept what she sees, then scrapes her gaze on Nicky and Joe who have already glanced at each other and away with forcedly neutral faces. Booker has stooped to pick up something from the dirt, keeping his head lowered. “Even if no one specifically wants these kids, they deserve better than us.”

Nile knows it’s not wrong. It’s barely a life for them, some days, when the memory of their beach vacation is barely a dream and she’s scared to move in bed because of the ghost sensation of full body bruises. Still, she looks back at Ava whispering urgently to her child daemon and thinks that this isn’t fair or right. Maybe all ten cages had never been full, maybe it had just been the four from the lab whose daemons had tried to hide in plain sight from the traps. But they were too late, and there are three daemons and one empty cage where William’s daemon should have been.

She stays in the car when Joe and Booker ferry the children into Copley’s guardianship. There aren’t a lot of times she’s felt old yet, but today she can imagine the distant future, where she’s perfectly fit on the outside and inside sanded dangerously paper thin.

“He’s found more labs,” Joe says when he swings himself into the shotgun seat.

“Not much of a paper trail, though,” Booker adds. “For the kids, or for whoever is doing this.”

Andy smiles, slow and mean. “Well, let’s hope they give their employees a thorough orientation on their first week,” she says. They drive away from the direction of the city, towards a shambling, isolated farm with the wooden scraps of a home and a barn that’s listing hard to the west. Nile knows that they’re going to ask questions before anything else, and she hopes that the scientist has enough sense to offer some helpful answers.

There are a series of missions. Foster homes with falsified records of legitimacy and empty bunk beds. Empty cages prepared for an unwilling child daemon. Every time they return to a safe house Nile finds it harder to sleep, sees the same fatigue in her team echoed in their daemons if not their faces. She rests when she can, like always, but every time she closes her eyes she sees William’s stuffed dog, clutched like a placeholder but not enough to save him.

Copley misses a check-in and they panic. While they’re scrambling to move out for him, the phone starts ringing. Booker sets it to video and there’s Copley, bags that should be criminal under his eyes. “I fell asleep compiling the data,” he admits and his voice is still rusty. “But I think we have something this time.”

“We all need to sleep,” Andy says. Her tone clearly isn’t judging, but because she’s Andy it isn’t pitched that far towards sympathy either. “Or, you do. We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”

Nile had mentioned the phrase in passing, and now deeply regrets giving Andy her most consistent joke of the past five years. It draws a laugh out of Copley, though. He scrubs a hand through his hair. “I’ve sent over the files. It’s a bigger complex and they’re on alert, of course, but I think there’s a chance to get in with minimal detection.”

Joe and Nicky hover over Andy’s shoulder as she pulls up the plans on her tablet. Nile has worked on languages but Andy had said it was better to start with an Italian that someone might actually speak to her in the street. She was right in a big picture sense, but it’s very annoying when Nile can only grasp the shape of the conversation about tactics and entry points in their long-dead, custom made lover’s patois.

She sits down hard next to Quynh, who spares a look from the daily Sudoku to smile at her. “Don’t take it on before you have to,” she advises. “Otherwise it’s all, utilize your longbow men here, which safehouse rations need restocking there. Before you know it you’ll be up late rereading _The_ _Prince_ and complaining about statecraft.”

“I just want to help,” Nile says.

Quynh, whose tone usually drifts between unbothered and teasing, looks at her seriously. “You have. For now, though, I have fucked up the top-middle square, please help me find where I went wrong.”

Nile looks back at the planning huddle that has drifted away from the video-chat screen and seems to involve some manipulation of bread-stick security forces. She leans her shoulder against Quynh and skims the squares. “So, there, I don’t think that should be a three.”

Andy brings them back together for the discussion anyway. She sits back in her chair while Joe leads the briefing, interspersed with Booker’s complaints about digital security and Nicky’s identification of choke points and blind corners. Quynh shoots her a quick smile and leans forward, coiled energy in her stillness.

“What do you think, Nile,” Andy says during a pause. “Upper story dorms? Another basement hellhole?”

Nile’s shoulders uncurl as she scans the map again. “Even if they usually keep them on the top floor, they’d have moved them to a more defensible location to use as… bait for us.” She taps on a square near the centre of the compound, and then another in a jagged corner that barely fits with the structure of the rest of the building. “Here, or here. I’d say the second, though, would be a more effective place to keep the kids still, _and_ it funnels down to the one hallway with potential combatants feeding in from the rooms running along it.”

Andy smiles at her and Nile feels a flutter of pride. She knows this stuff, if not better than them then at least more clinically. Joe squeezes and shakes her shoulder affectionately as she relaxes into the discussion on entry points.

Quynh and Andy split the team between them, which is really just a question of which one demands Nicky and Joe first since they function as a package deal in an assault. Nile is happy, still, to end up with Booker and Quynh, even if they chronologically have less experience working together than she does with Andy and the guys. Quynh is, if nothing else, easier to cover because Nile’s carrying position for her gun allows her to shoot over Quynh’s shoulder in a tight space.

Combat isn’t simple, but Nile can’t entirely repress the comfort she finds in it. They’ve trained, they know each other, and they’re just executing step by step. She takes turns with Booker to follow on Quynh’s six, swapping out easily as they pivot around corners and incapacitate guards. It’s still slow going. By the time the hallway is clear, Nile can feel the edges of fatigue in strange places: the angle of her elbow, a stiff spot on her left calf. Barely bloody and with the rising potential that this shirt will be safe to use another day, she takes a moment to prop herself against the wall and rest.

Booker is busy with the door panel, anyways. She’s just covering him. Inside looks like a long cooler, frosting their breaths the moment they step in. Nile does one last sweep of the hallway and retreats as Quynh shuts and secures the door behind her. Booker has already hauled cautiously at the exit door on the other side, found it secured, and knelt to deal with another panel.

There’s a thunk, and then a low hiss. Booker doesn’t spare a glance up, so Nile does. There is airflow in the vents and she can smell the start of something cloying. “Gas.”

“Hurry it up, Book,” Quynh snaps when she can’t open their first door. There’s been another bolt, Nile thinks. The thunk of something strong sliding home. She pulls her shirt up over her face as Quynh twists her scarf into a face mask.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” he bitches. Baudelaire paces next to him, tail low and growls audibly. He smacks the wall when the panel goes green, stands and pulls at the door. Nile isn’t surprised when it doesn’t move either. Booker turns to them with the most tired look on his face she’s seen in a while.

“I hate gas deaths,” he says, then sits down to wait it out. “Just as bad coming back as they are killing you.”

Nile is woozy as she sinks next to him. Quynh chooses a spot parallel, fusses with her clothes as she settles. “Check in will be in five. I’m sure Joe would love the opportunity to dramatically ram down another door—does he still do that?”

“Belize, ‘22,” Booker groans. “It was so embarrassing. And now they have people doing it in those dumb cop shows, like it’s any way to enter a room.”

Nile leans her head back against the cold door and laughs. “Dramatic, though. You have to give the artist space to work, right?”

Booker grumbles something unflattering in French. Between one curse and the next, Nile feels her vision expand and blur uncomfortably, and she gives in.

\--

It feels like her chest is trying to cave in on herself. Nile wakes with the heels of her bound wrists digging into the space between the collarbone like she can fix the aching emptiness inside with pressure. She doesn’t think she died, but she’s seen enough now that waking from a nightmare and reviving after death sometimes feel the same.

“I’m here,” Booker says from her left. “We’re in a white room, transparent walls on two sides—not glass, I checked. Can’t get out of the restraints, either. I can see Baudelaire and Chris, but they’re not in our room.”

Nile rolls herself onto her side, facing him. Booker is pressed tight against the glass, and over his shoulder she can see two cages at the far side of the other room, one with a heap of reddish fur on the bottom and the other has _Chris_ , a hood over his eyes like he’s some rich asshole’s trained pet. She worms herself closer to them, feelings the ache in her chest ease slightly. Booker props her up with a leg when she gets close enough to sit against him and the glass.

“Son of a bitch,” he offers conversationally.

She’s caught her breath, close enough in range to Chris now and immediately recovered from the indignity of her movements. “You didn’t say how you are.”

Booker is capable of the lowest distance of separation from Baudelaire. It’s a low bar, considering the company they keep, but she can tell from the sweat on his hairline that he’s still hurting.

“You ever heard of the Boxer rebellion?” he asks after a long pause for consideration. “It was… a shitshow. Chinese peasants against any army that could get its ass in gear in time to try and claim a piece of the pie. Even after the fighting was done, they burned villages, pillaged—“

“Wait, is this better or worse,” Nile asks.

He shoots her a tired smile. “For me, personally? Haven’t decided yet.”

Nile presses a little closer, so the backs of their arms are pressed together from shoulder to knuckles. She doesn’t know how much time passes until the light goes on in the room abutting the other clear wall. Two metal boxes, a tangle of wires and buttons and a smear on the floor that might still be blood. Quynh is unconscious and not dead when they bring her in. Nile can tell only because someone who has protective gloves up to their elbows has directly picked up Thủy Tinh and is putting him in a box separate from Quynh.

Nile tries to stand up, stumbling over herself when she remembers that her ankles are fastened as well. She can see the colour wash out of Booker’s face when he sees the lab coats, steadies him with another push of their touching arms.

They see Quynh start to move before they hear her. The box they’ve locked her in sways once with the force of her motion, and then she’s driving her heels rhythmically into the glass viewing window in the door. There’s a click as the PA system turns on and they can hear her, screaming bloody murder in counterpoint to the rhythmic damage she applies to the box. Thủy Tinh moves like Quynh screams, small frantic twists as he seeks an exit point in his own cage.

An irritated voice, also from the speaker in the corner of the room, “Miss, if you’d only calm down this would go much easier—“

Nile is pretty sure Quynh has moved past words traditionally used for swearing to some kind of fundamental description of the torture she’ll enact when she’s out. She doesn’t stop moving, even when the scientists back away to a control panel on the wall, even when the machinery starts to hum and then whine.

The blade is so fine that Nile recognizes it only by the glimmer it leaves behind as it falls. Cut an angel’s wing, Nicky had said. Both Quynh and Thủy Tinh have stopped moving, the scientists have fallen silent. Nile hears Booker’s harsh breaths and the low buzz of dead air on the speakers.

Quynh begins to laugh. It’s not quite the mad hysteria Nile knows from the bad nights, Quynh pushing and goading Nicky and Joe like provoking them will release some kind of tension in her. Nor is it Quynh’s real laugh, sharp-edged but comfortable, inviting anyone else to laugh with her. Quynh sounds like the last noise a man would hear as he realized that he was not the hunter, just before he died.

“Did you think,” Quynh shouts in English, “that you could hurt me?”

The scientists scramble, frantically checking cords and skirting close enough to examine the blade. Quynh still laughs, still doesn’t kick her way free. She asks, “What exactly do you think you could do to me, now. What new suffering have you dreamed.”

Booker shudders violently against Nile’s side, pressing his hand to Baudelaire’s spot on his chest. Nile wants to tell him to stay calm but she can’t form words over the roiling of her own stomach. She turns her head to see that Chris is still there, takes in Baudelaire’s slumped trembling form at the same time.

The lights in the operation room click off, like it’s one of those creepy animatronic shows that lights scenes in order to draw your attention along. Nile’s sense of foreboding crescendos and the door to the daemon’s room swings silently open.

The new man is unremarkable. He wears a suit that’s obviously off the rack, slightly too big at his shoulders and a fraction too short at the wrists. His hair is just barely longer than a military cut, styled into sharp peaks with gel. She can’t see his daemon, but he also doesn’t spark the instinctive horror she’d had with the children. It must be in the messenger bag draped across his shoulders.

“Corporal Freeman.”

Nile’s body snaps tight, instinctively read to stand to attention. Booker shifts his shoulder to keep her down, which leaves time for the second wave of realization and foreboding and nausea. She looks at him and nods once, sharply, before the both turn so they’re not twisting their necks to see the man.

“Corporal,” the man repeats. The word digs into Nile’s stomach like a bullet. “Or, Nile. Is it still Nile? I’m afraid we thought we’d lost you, there. It wasn’t until we had a chance to settle your daemon down that we were able to verify your identity.”

The man reaches out through the cage and slowly traces his index finger along the back of Chris’ wing. Nile feels the ghost of the touch on her arm, riotously _wrong_ and bad. No one touches Chris but her, even with her new family. Worse, he’s dopey from the hood or whatever fucking drugs these people have and he doesn’t flinch away, so she can feel where that one finger lingers at the end of his wingspan.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says flatly. Not the best lie, but a solid baseline. The man unclasps the cage and reaches in. His touch is along the back of her neck, down her shoulder blades. Nile curls in on herself, bites her tongue to stop from screaming or worse.

“I don’t know who you think you are, but you’re wrong,” Booker takes over. “There’s been a horrible mistake.”

“Ah, and you are another mystery.” The man blessedly stops touching Chris when he turns his attention to Booker. He reaches into his bag and pulls a worn wallet out theatrically. “Mister LePage? This identity doesn’t seem to have as much life in it as you do, and yet we can find no record that fits. It’s very curious. An invisible man and a dead marine, I don’t suppose you’ll be missed too much.

He has no idea what they are. The thought makes Nile’s blood sing. First there’s the relief, and then a joy that’s almost malicious at the thought of what’s coming. The man doesn’t even realize how significant an error he’s made.

And he continues to monologue. Like an asshole, Nile thinks viciously. “We’ve been focusing our research on children, cutting away the sins before they can fully entrench. However, a good scientist always wants a baseline for comparison and it is so hard to jump those hoops with the ethics board these days.

Another too-fast movement and he’s cracked the cage to grab Baudelaire by her scruff. She twists and whines sharply and Booker’s eyes snap closed. The muscles in his arm flex and release and he sucks in a deep breath, then squares his shoulders.

“Our friend in the other room was right,” Booker says with a miraculously steady voice. “Do you think you’ve invented suffering?”

“You’re terrible baseline subjects,” the man says and shakes Baudelaire once so that she drops limp. This time Booker can’t stop from cringing, but he keeps his eyes on the man in the other room. “However, beggars can’t be choosers. Perhaps, Mister LePage, you’ll feel differently after you are more intimate with the intercision machine.”

Nile suppresses another shudder, wraps her arms around herself instead of reaching for Chris. The man’s eyes are curious and he smiles in what he clearly intends to be a kind way. Then he drops Baudelaire and leaves. Nile can’t hug Booker, can’t touch her daemon. She blinks furiously until her vision clears of tears and then she can plant their shoulders again together as Booker wilts into her side.

“We just have to stay alive until they come for us,” she says as quietly as possible, emphasizing “alive” as hard as she can without spelling the word in neon lights. He jerks his head in understanding but doesn’t pull himself back together, so she adds, “Just think of how pissed Andy is going to be.”

This earns a snorted laugh. “At them, or us?”

“Well, I guess we’ll find out.”

She isn’t sure how she falls asleep, but the world seems even more blurry when she wakes. Booker is jostling her hard. She notices her hands are still tied, that the light is bright. There’s a stab like a headache when she tries to focus but it feels distant, like something she neither caused nor could fix.

“Kid, come on,” Booker whispers. “Focus.” He looks like he’s just gone on a bender, dark circles under bleary eyes and face so tense that a muscle is ticking in his cheek. “Bau says they were pumping gas into their room, you can do this. Just like four am training.”

Nile imagines the drowsy fatigue is a solid thing and mentally pushes at it. She still feels like she could fall over and never get up but her awareness also widens past Booker’s face to the flashing lights overhead. The PA is off and the room is silent, there’s no movement.

The door dents in with an audible crunch. Nile gets her knees under her, draws herself up tense to launch herself at the newcomer. Another few impacts and the door gives way, Joe entering foot first. He scans the room and settles his gaze on her, kneeling with a knife to work at her fastenings. “Book?”

“Did you get Quynh? They tried to do something to her.”

“Quynh is spitting mad and ready to pull a Bathory,” Joe confirms. He presses both of his large, warm hands to Nile’s cheeks and checks her face. “You okay, kid?”

“I’ve had nicer naps,” Nile responds to draw out his fond smile. She shakes the numbness from her fingers and stands as Joe repeats the process with Booker. “Our daemons, they’re in the other room.”

When she turns, Nicky is already there, Baudelaire’s prone form draped over one of his shoulders. He’s got Chris’ cage open, her daemon a spilled pile of feathers, and is methodically opening cupboards looking for something. A blanket, Nile realizes. She loves these people all over again, hard enough that the dizziness retreats another fraction. She smacks one hand on the glass to draw Nicky’s attention and nods once, pointedly. There’s no way it could be worse than the strange man’s proprietary petting.

Nicky nods back, face solemn, and reaches gently into the cage. Nile’s body lights up with the touch, again, but it doesn’t hurt the way it did before. Nicky’s touch on Chris feels like Joe’s did on her face, even as he bobbles Chris to keep his wings folded and finally gets him tucked up against Nicky’s chest where the fabric deadens the feeling of contact.

Nile is ready when she feels Joe set the gun against her palm, pulls it up to check it even as she’s still wavering on her feet. She doesn’t try to turn away Joe’s supportive arm around her waist, immediately matches her strides to his as they head right, away from the noise down the hallway.

“I have a special treat for you, Book,” Joe says as he steers them both down a corner, into a new hall where most of the lights have been shot out. “Everything’s prepped and just waiting for an expert hand to knock this place down.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a very thoughtful gift giver, asshole.” Nile can hear the smile in Booker’s voice, even if she can’t look anywhere but straight ahead over the muzzle of her gun. She staggers another foo t when Joe lets go of her outside the last door, nearly overbalances but keeps to his feet as he and Booker complete the last of the explosives, trigger the countdown. Nicky takes an elbow to keep her upright as they move through the trees, back to the panel van parked neatly next to a telephone pole with all the tools of the trade scattered like the worker had just left for a moment. Nicky gets her down onto a seat as her head starts to clear, and then deposits the familiar weight in her lap. Nile drops her head down on top of Chris’s back and lets herself cry.

She doesn’t look up when the van shakes as each member of the team climbs in, or when they pull onto the bumpy single lane road and away from the site. There’s a crack of concrete exploding and the now-familiar crump of Booker’s explosions as they go. A large, soft head nudges her thigh and rests there, breathing hotly against her leg. The van is silent, which tells her without needing to see that Andy is steaming mad in the front, and definitely behind the wheel from the sharp turns.

“Now I understand why you drink instead of me,” Chris says, muffled by feathers and her own weight. “This is terrible. I feel terrible. Can birds vomit?”

The tears don’t stop as she laughs, helps him rise up to a more comfortable position in her lap and straightens his feathers as he puffs and sways indignantly. The tension in the car has decreased and she, for once, doesn’t know where they’re going. Andy meets her eyes in the rearview mirror and smiles grimly. That man in his ill-fitted suit doesn’t know what’s coming for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nile Freeman - Christopher, golden eagle  
> Andromache the Scythian - Party Horse, known officially as Partitavus the horse.  
> Booker - Baudelaire (red fox)  
> Joe & Nicky - Zipphora (lioness) and Miriam (wolf)  
> Copley - unnamed cat, aka Catley.  
> Quynh - Thủy Tinh (king cobra)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team raises some hell. Things, inexplicably and unjustly, get worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay. My internet was out FOR FIVE DAYS (I'm as shocked that I survived as you all must be.) I'm hopeful that no other tragedy befalls me, because this is set to conclude Friday with a oneshot Joe/Nicky in the same universe next week.
> 
> Enjoy. :)

For a disconcerting moment, she thinks her dad is carrying her. It’s a hazy memory, getting home late and being scooped up with Chris tucked inside the pocket of her hoodie, the smell of her dad’s cologne when he snuggled her face up against his shoulder. She squints an eye open but all she can see is the stretch of blue fabric across a collarbone.

“Don’t wake up,” Andy says from somewhere to the left in her usual follow-my-orders tone. Nile’s head is still throbbing and she does feel exhausted, so she lets her eyes drift shut again.

The couch below her is too short to stretch out. Her head is propped against one arm, and her knees hook over the far side. She has a blanket and above that, the weight and familiar smell of Chris on her stomach. When she cracks an eye open she sees Catley first, squinting mistrustfully down at her from a sphinx pose on the back of the couch. Nile blurrily thinks, _the gang’s all here_.

“I appreciate,” Copley’s voice drifts out from another room, tight as a wire, “that we do have some legitimate reasons for trust issues. However, I gave you all the information I had. I’m so sorry this happened, but I also helped—“

“Perhaps we will trust you more if next time, you are the one who is kidnapped and tortured,” Joe drawls back.

Catley cracks an eye open at Nile and then opens her mouth wide in one of those unnerving cat yawns. Her tail is swishing slowly, at odds with the tone of Copley’s voice. Nile’s limbs feel disconnected from her brain, like she’s been thinking and worrying so long that her physical body has just given in and also taken in pain. Sustained soreness isn’t something she missed very much. She shuffles her way over to the doorway, leans on the jamb to survey the kitchen. Quynh and Nicky are sitting on the counter with Booker slouched and leaning his elbows unexpectedly close to Nicky’s leg. Joe is, as usual, a step behind and to the side of Andy, hands tucked in his pocket but eyes furious.

Andy and Copley are nose to nose. Nile watches Copley lean slightly back and Andy move forward to fill the space. It’s like a very ominous dance.

Nile clears her throat and it’s a sign of how invested everyone has been in the argument that she can feel the weight of their attention slip from Copley and Andy to her. She keeps her tone intentionally light. “Are we fighting before breakfast?”

“A late lunch,” Nicky speaks first. He hops down and moves to take her elbow, steers her into one of the kitchen chairs on the spectator half of the kitchen. “How do you feel, Nile?”

“Osaka ’24,” she offers in another attempt to lighten the mood. At Copley’s face she adds, “Did anyone get the number on the semi that ran me over?”

“The pain is normal,” Booker says. He looks tired, Quynh looks like she’s got a full ten hours on a pillowtop mattress. “They hurt our—“ he gestures at the daemons expansively, “souls. It’s not the same as resetting a bone.”

“Okay,” she says slowly. Andy has taken the tiniest step back, if only to stop breathing directly into Copley’s mouth. “The kids? Are they okay?”

“We got them out,” Nicky says and presses a mug of tea that’s more honey than water into her hands. “All but one are completely fine, and the last will be. In time, we hope.”

Nile slides down to slouch in her boneless relief. The fight doesn’t pick up again immediately. Copley stands in the middle of the island as Andy, Nicky and Joe put together the rest of the meal. When Nile rolls her head, her neck cracks loudly. She steals a look at Quynh, does the quick visual inspection that’s become a post-mission habit. “Are you okay?”

“Obviously I provoked them into taking me,” Quynh says calmly. Andy involuntarily makes a noise like an injured animal and Quynh scoffs at her and shrugs. “Nile is an infant, and Booker can’t even leave Baudelaire on the other side of the house before they feel the pulling. Besides, Andromache, it is always preferable to choose the danger to which you will be exposed.”

“Thank you,” Nile says very quietly. Quynh’s excuse focused on Booker, but Nile’s skin still crawls at the thought of that man’s gentle touch. She’s not sure she’d have made it if things got more aggressive.

Quynh nods at her and smiles. “Besides, it did not hurt any worse than five hundred years separated by an ocean’s worth of water.”

It might be too early for the joke, Andy flinches hard and Joe is distracted from his supporting death glare at Copley. He turns away and scrubs a hand through his hair hard, shoulders curling in a bit. Booker hesitates and then rests his hand down on the space between him and Quynh, and she pats it perfunctorily. Her smile is brittle but firmly in place as she stares Andy down.

“Thủy Tinh and I survived a great deal of time without each other. Even if we had a normal relationship before that, we are accustomed to separation. We choose to be together, unlike,” and she waves an expansive hand, though Nile notices that the other is pressed gently against Thủy Tinh’s coils. “I’m not these imbecile’s… what do you call it. Target market. Legitimately, when they chose separation over imprisonment they lost the power they thought they held.”

The snake daemon speaks loud enough to be heard in the room, which is still jarring to Nile. He’s scoffing, his snake’s head mimicking the familiar motion of Quynh’s hair flip. “Inadequate research is always disappointing in one’s opponents.”

“Quynh,” Andy says in the voice she makes specifically for the other woman. It has the weight of their history, but Nile can also feel the guilt that Andy is still trying to mend from where it destabilized their relationship. Quynh hops down and closes the distance between them, threads her arms loosely around Andy’s waist and leans back to study her.

Quynh’s face softens. “Andromache. Later.”

There is an uncomfortable pause where Andy and Quynh stare at each other and everyone else looks pointedly away, almost comically exaggerated. Booker breaks the silence by muttering, “They said something about an intercision machine.”

“And it had the blade, like Nicky mentioned with the—the ghosts,” Nile adds quickly. She doesn’t look at him and he doesn’t shift to face her. “They have it set up like a guillotine they can activate from a distance.

“I’m not sure if I want him here for this,” Andy says briskly, jerking her thumb in Copley’s direction.

Catley enters the room silently, paces her way around the perimeter and then comes to a rest near Copley’s foot.

“You may be feline upset right meow, but your fears are unfounded,” she says in her dry little voice. “We have been paw-sitively trans-purr-ent about our hiss-tory and current activities.”

Nile closes her eyes. She cannot. Copley’s voice takes over, adding, “I can never apologize enough for my role in what happened. But I came here as a show of my faith in you. If you find out I’ve betrayed you, well, I’m right to hand.”

Quynh picks up their recollections of their capture as if there had been no interlude. “There were mesh barriers for each of us, fine enough that we could not reach each other. And they clearly expected a more dramatic change than what the machine produced on me.” Between the three of them, they can stitch together a full picture of their imprisonment, the space in which they were contained.

“Intercision,” Nicky murmurs like he’s tasting the word. “It’s not a term I am familiar with—Joe, Andy?”

Andy shrugs and shakes her head but Joe squints hard at the floor and then leaves the room. Copley clears his throat. “Is… he coming back?”

From the other room there’s a series of dull smacks and Arabic curses. Joe shouts a question to Nicky in Italian, and Nile watches the other man squint hard and then say, in English for her benefit, “One of the Leos? The—the one who loved Aquinas so much, I think.”

It sounds like Joe has tipped over an entire bookshelf. He returns, slightly pink-cheeked, carrying a battered book rebound in plain cardboard. He drops it on the table with a smug smile.

Nile leans in and flips a few pages. “Who’s Leone XIII?”

Nicky waves a hand absently, “You know, longest living Pope, engaged in the debates about the status of workers and the free market?”

“I absolutely did not know that,” Nile says seriously. Joe leans over her shoulder and flips ahead to a section labelled ‘canonizationis.’

“Also the guy who beatified Urban the second in 1881,” he says triumphantly, and at her look adds, “The one who started the first Crusades.”

It’s enough context for Nile’s mind to start ticking again as she scans down the rows of Latin text. Near the bottom, buried in the middle of something that must be a biography, she sees the word ‘intercision.’

“It makes sense,” Booker says cautiously. “If the Crusaders were trying to separate humans from their daemons, it had to have started somewhere. Something must have legitimized it.”

“Some one,” Nicky agrees. Nile blinks at him, actually looking at Booker with the thoughtful face he gets when he’s calculating wind resistance. “Remission of sins to all who died in the service of Christ.”

“A wonderful excuse to push the limits of morality, when one knows there will not be consequences,” Joe finishes.

Nile knows that none of them believe in God the same way she does, but it still feels uncomfortable to be discussing the ways in which a leader of the church might legitimize the torture of women and children. Even in the past.

Joe catches the tail end of her expression. “Would it comfort you to know that there were two popes at the time?”

“Why do you have this book? And, sorry, but why do you know anything about the medieval Catholic church.”

Joe smiles widely. “Would you believe me if I said, know your enemy?”

From the floor, Zipphora says, “The book was free and Joe is a hoarder.”

Nile looks at Nicky who shrugs fondly. “Both can be true.”

She shakes her head hard and looks back down at the page. “So, if he was made into a saint, that means they had to do research on him, right? Miracles and life-and-times stuff."

“And perhaps that those who followed in his footsteps would also keep the memory of his name alive,” Joe agrees. “How’s that for a lead?”

“I was really, really hoping for map coordinates,” Andy says dryly. “But good work, Joe. Copley, Booker, can you look into this?”

There’s a moment where Booker and Copley almost stick themselves in the doorway before Copley cedes the ground with a twist of his shoulder. Behind them, Baudelaire nudges Catley hard with her muzzle until both are following their humans.

Nicky claps his hands suddenly, and Nile jumps. “Just sandwiches for lunch, I think.”

The rest of the words blur around ‘intercision’ on the page in front of her. Nile feels the ghost hand on her spine again, shudders hard and snaps the pages closed. Anything for a distraction at this point. “I’ll give you a hand.”

The muzzy feeling persists well into the afternoon. Nile eats even though she isn’t hungry yet, then takes herself out the back door so she can lay on the grass and think. Above her, Chris swoops and dives sharply. She can sense his pleasure faintly, like a headache easing from behind her eyes.

“Does it hurt for you, too?” she asks when Andy sits next to her. “When—I was learning to _ride_ on Party, Andy.”

“Partitavus,” Andy corrects absently. She’s the only one who doesn’t use a nickname for her daemon, though Nile thinks by now that her correction of everyone else on the team is in part to draw out their joy in the joke. “We wouldn’t have let you do it if it had hurt.”

“You let me stab you.”

Andy laughs, stretches out flat next to Nile and rests her hand over the scar that had stayed above her hip despite the return of her healing abilities. “I didn’t let you stab me, Nile. You earned the right to stab me. It took you years to be good enough to stab me.”

“Stabbed you the first day we met,” Nile grumbles cheerfully. “And then I was holding out on you, old woman. I didn’t want you to feel embarrassed when you were talking about the history of your scars. _And_ I stabbed Joe within a few months.”

“Joe is a soft touch,” Andy says fondly.

“But really,” because Nile isn’t ready to give up on the topic, not yet. “I thought it was weird at first when I saw how Nicky and Joe touch each other’s daemons, but they’re… them. And then you and Quynh are both fine with it, but me and Booker—“

“Well, you’re very young,” Andy says. It’s a statement of fact. “There are plenty of awful things that haven’t happened to you yet, and I’m not in a hurry to expose you. We touch each other’s daemons because—we’re a team.”

“We’re family,” Nile corrects. Andy turns her face, glowing in the sun’s light, to smile at her.

“I think if I pulled Chris out of the air and pinned him, it would still feel pretty fucking shitty for you,” she says instead.

“So it’s like—intention. Because we love each other, we can touch each other’s daemons?”

Andy hums and shrugs. Another classic non-answer. Nile picks her way through it, forcing herself to compare the comfort of steadying her hand on Zipphora’s shoulder or the flex of Party’s muscles under her legs with the bone deep violation of the strange man and his proprietary touch. The juxtaposition between his act of gentleness and the complete lack of consent he had from her or from Chris.

“And it hurts you guys, when someone else touches your daemon?”

“If they can get a hand on them,” Andy drawls. “But yes, it’s uncomfortable when someone tries to stab my large, emotionally independent horse daemon, Nile.”

Nile nods and thinks again. “Maybe I should practice, so I get used to how it feels. Good or bad. It could be useful in combat to trust Chris with one of you.”

“You don’t have to.” Andy’s voice is firmer. When Nile glances over she’s squinting up at the clouds. “We like you both the way you are. You’re doing a good job, kid. You don’t need to change to be like us.”

“I’m changing anyway,” Nile says quietly. Chris lands between them, hops gracelessly closer to Andy’s hand. She reaches out her fingers steadily and lets him duck his beak into them, then scratches the front of his neck gently. “Might as well be who I want to be.”

“Never had a doubt of that,” Andy agrees and climbs to her feet. Chris flutters and hops back into the air as the door to the house closes.

When she wakes later, the sun has moved down the sky and she can hear the creak of the dangerously old chairs on the back porch. She can feel the emotional hurt start to heal over inside her, the same gradual growing process of muscles and fat and skin stretching out together to recover a flesh wound. Still, she’s not ready to talk to anyone. She keeps her eyes closed.

“How is she?” is Nicky, voice gentle.

More surprising, Booker answers. “She’s going to be fine. It had to happen eventually, right? She handled it well in there.”

“I meant Baudelaire,” Nicky says calmly, switching to French. Nile is pretending to sleep, so she doesn’t fistpump. Booker’s sharp intake of breath is audible, anyway.

“Oh. We’ve been through worse,” he says awkwardly. “Like Quynh said, better us than Nile.”

“Minimizing your pain has not served us well, Booker.” She can picture the way Nicky would lean a shoulder to Booker as an invitation to talk, even if his voice is desert-dry. “How are you.”

“It’s shit,” Booker says after a pause. “It always hurts, and I think of those kids. And being held captive—“

Nile is surprised again when Nicky laughs quietly. “We cannot even stay in one place by our own choice. Of course it rankles you to be forced into stillness.”

“Nicky, I’m sorry.” She can’t tell which of them sucks in that first unsteady breath. Booker’s voice cracks when he says, “I’ll make it up to you eventually.”

“Joe’s forgiven you,” Nicky says instead. The chair creaks slowly, Nile imagines him leaning himself back further into it. “Were you surprised by that?” Booker must not say anything because after a silence Nicky continues, “I was the one who asked for the banishment.”

“Kind of figured that out when you cooked dinner for the two of us and then pretended I wasn’t at the table when we ate,” Booker says dryly. “I should have known Joe wouldn’t hold out on it. He doesn’t even bother to hold grudges in the Euros. But I get it. You deserve to be mad at me.”

“I won’t always be,” Nicky says gently. “I will learn to trust you as a teammate again, and you will be a brother to me regardless of what you did. If—“

“If?” Booker’s voice is so hopeful it squeezes Nile’s heart like a vice.

“If you fucking tell us next time, Book. Tell Joe or tell Andy if you can’t talk to me. But before you blame us for your isolation, you tell us. I don’t care that you’re jealous of me and Joe. I know that we have been blessed beyond what any man could fairly ask for. But I will not tolerate an unnecessary schism.”

“I won’t hurt Joe again,” Booker promises.

“That’s not what I asked. I don’t care if you hurt us, you still tell us. Can you do that, Sebastien?” Nile recognizes the name from Copley’s serial killer wall. It still draws a shiver down her spine.

Booker switches to Italian, so low Nile can’t make it out. There’s another groan of protesting wood. Nicky’s voice is further away when he says, “Don’t snack before dinner. I will make ham and truffled grits.”

The door closes again and Booker sighs, long and hard. Nile stretches her arms up dramatically but does genuinely appreciate the pull against her rotator cuffs, the pop of her wrists. When she sits up, Booker rolls his eyes at her. “You know when you’re actually sleeping you snore.”

“I do not! You snore,” Nile says immediately and then feels exactly like she’s ten years old fighting with her brother. “And truffled grits, what the fuck?”

“I guess you haven’t had them yet,” he agrees. He looks fond and pained. “What with all the turkey meatloaf he’s folded into the menu since I’ve been back. An apology and a promise to communicate are certainly worth it for a few weeks respite from ketchup.”

“He was spite cooking at you?” Nile asks incredulously. She adds it to her new file on do not mess with Nicky,’ placing it below ‘sustained silent treatment broken only to judgingly ask if you’ve decided you’re not _hungry_ for dinner right now’ and above ‘will let you fall out of a window without even blinking.’

“The last time he thought Joe was getting too reckless on missions, we ate nothing but pasta salad and falafel for three months,” Booker agrees and offers her a hand up. “I’m not even sure pasta salad was a … thing yet. Nicky just refused to serve anything warm until Joe promised to stop getting garroted.”

“I promised to get garroted _less_ ,” Joe corrects him. “Come help me with this website, Book, I don’t know what the fuck a dark web is.”

\--

When the video call starts several weeks later, the screen is filled with a blurred shot of nostrils in a wrinkled pink face. It retreats into the clear shot of a capuchin, and then small hands lift it confidently up and to the left.

“Doctor Silvia,” Nicky says cheerfully.

“Oh, just Izabel to friends,” she chirps back. She has the same sort of smile as Joe, warm friendliness with the potential to slide instantly into flirtatious. The years have been pretty good to her, Nile thinks. She has glasses, though they might have been contacts on their first meeting. Her hair is shot through with grey, though in the same purposefully messy updo that Nile recognizes both from in person and in her staff photos. Her office, or at least the parts visible through the wide-lensed webcam, is a disaster zone. Whatever’s hidden from view is probably worse.

“I very much enjoyed your most recent book,” Nicky continues since he’s the only one who has any manners without provocation.

“Thank you so much!” She doesn’t pack as much into a speaking opportunity now, whether it’s that she’s settled or that talking to an endless stream of undergrads has fed the urge inside her. “I knew the argument was sound, but the minutiae can be so difficult to convey effectively in translation.”

He hums. “Yes, the German text was more direct with the significance of the verb selection, but I felt that the English adequately captured the emotional responses of the testimonies, even in translation.”

Andy clears her throat loudly. Nicky does not look even slightly apologetic, and Silvia’s gaze ticks sideways as she turns her attention to Andy on the screen. Her voice goes from academic to teasing. “I have to say, I feel like this project is the sort of thing that people are disappeared for, Copley.”

“I couldn’t disappear you if I tried, doctor,” he says fondly.

"Too many forums? Curses, I will be infamous until the death of the last hard drive.” She pauses and shuffles the papers in front of her. “Fortunately, given the extent of papal influence on legal matters well into modernity, I didn’t have to scramble for an excuse to access to the archives. As I’m sure you remember, even Robert Langdon was surprised and delighted by his invitation to the Vatican archives. In reality, it’s just paperwork.”

The rest of her team glances at Nile, and she shrugs. “Come on,” Copley groans. “The Da Vinci Code? Angels and Demons? They were books and movies, I’m not that old.”

Nile, as someone who is chronologically younger but with plans to get significantly older, chooses not to tease Copley. Besides, any book that involves a character being invited to an archive probably didn’t fall within her normal reading lists before the Marines.

“I’ll send you the video file,” Silvia says cheerfully. Her face transforms to a grin that’s so excited it’s almost ominous. “You’re going to hate it. My point being, since I already knew a few of the archivists I just said I was sounding out a research project on relationships and reciprocity between cardinals during the tenure of Leo the thirteenth.”

Nile knows it’s important. Her eyes still glaze over.

“Look, if you wanted a catchy subject you should have let me bring in my friend Michael. He’s looking at death and undeath in medieval literature. He could have given you some creepy fairy tales. But you hired a legal historian, and I am going to tell you about how you can reconstruct power dynamics using Social Network Analysis. Let’s look at Figure 5.”

It’s a dizzying number of names with lines between them. “Leo XIII” is at the centre with a dense network of lines of varying widths radiating out from him, as well as a spider’s web of thinner lines between the different names clustered in his orbit.

“This model might actually be useful to you,” Silvia says with unwarranted glee. Her capuchin daemon hops and claps his paws together. “See, you start with a person or group you want to map, and each person is one node. Then you figure out the number of contacts between two people—letters, endorsements, cosigning, whatever, and the more links there are the thicker the line is. This is Leo’s life in general...” and then she flips to one that’s noticeably different, even if Nile couldn’t explain how with money on the line, “and this is him in the five years leading up to the canonization of Urban. If I switch back and forth...”

Joe leans in. “That group at 170 degrees has thicker lines in the short period than in the lifetime chart.”  
  
“Exactly! Which implies that their relationship to Leo correlated strongly with his interest in Urban. So let’s take Leo out of the equation and focus in on the Cardinal he had the greatest levels of contact with,” as the screen dives in to focus on the group of Urban supporters, “and we see that although Leo is closely linked with Urban, the network here actually focuses on this deacon. That means he’s not formally a priest, but you often find deacons with bigger roles in pastoral care or church committees.”

“That explanation has tricked me into thinking I understand what you did just there,” Quynh says cheerfully. “So who’s the deacon?”

“His family had been associated with the church for generations, and going backwards I couldn’t find anything particularly unusual about them. Of course, the nuance of records gets a little spotty when _some people_ view them as private property instead of a shared history.”

“I literally own that manuscript,” Andy says dryly. “It was a birthday present. Maybe when I die I’ll leave it to you in my will.”

Silvia has apparently also received the memo that death is no longer on the table and throws her hands up dramatically. She doesn’t look genuinely upset, but she also clearly isn’t going to let the matter drop. “Edward Smith. The deacon is Edward Smith, any relation?"

It’s Nicky’s turn to shrug dismissively. “I don’t even remember when I was Smith last, I think I’m a Rizzo now. Or Ragheb if Booker ever got around to filing that marriage certificate.”

“The weird thing about Edward Smith,” Copley prompts Silvia hopefully. He has the strained look around his eyes that he gets when he thinks too hard about the implications of his lifestyle.

“He was the last deacon in his family. Then one grandson bought into an early exploration of coagulation and blood types, and another went into neuroscience. One looked into Dust, capital-D but I got blocked pretty hard when I started to read more on that. One published a book on the history of daemons, which is... poorly sourced at best. Since then the family seems to dabble between business and science. Their network is too spread out now for me to do something like this, you’d have to get in an actual sociologist or maybe a team.”

Nile looks at the final chart, a star-map of names and professions, and thinks bigger picture. The void in the middle of the map is the shape of Ava’s face and her trembling child-daemon, constantly reaching out like the other will vanish again.

“They think they’ll get something from separating children and daemons, right,” she says carefully. “Something that’s worth experimenting on, something that has a long history but needs cutting edge developments in a lot of different fields. And it doesn’t replicate what witches can do, because the process still turns them into ghosts.”

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be very historical for me to answer that question for you based on what I have now,” Silvia says. The sparkle in her eyes has dimmed. “We all make guesses, but it would be unprofessional of me to make a leap with the study only partially completed.”

“You’ve done enough,” Copley says. “We can work with this. Thank you, Izabel. Will you be ready by the time we are?”

“Oh, I have History Extra on the hook for an article, we can drop something with lots of visuals there for legitimacy’s sake and then do a wider media sweep when the shit hits the fan.”

Copley exits the video call without a goodbye, shifts to look up at them. “You said you wanted these people brought to justice for what we’re doing. It’s—exactly the opposite of what I normally do for you. So I asked a few associates how they’d act if someone didn’t want them airing an opinion, and got... several emphatic answers.”

“You’re going to Wikileaks this?” Nile asks incredulously. “Will that even work?”

“It’s better than Wikileaks because you’ve paid enough established professionals to earn their interest, and when they’re interested in something they don’t let it go. When I tell Isabel that she’s ready to publish, she’s going to shatter the known history of wartime torture. And it’s going to happen at the same time as a very patient financial analyst in India reveals an extensive paper trail of private funding into morally dubious experiments, and a biologist releases a short documentary on the significance of daemons in human anatomy. We’re going to make it so there’s no rock left for them to hide under, when you get these bastards.”

“You’re more angry than we are,” Andy comments. It isn’t something that can often be said of them.

“The kids—“ Copley hesitates, then scrubs a hand over his face. “They’re going to live. But that’s it. They’re going to live like you last saw them for God knows how long, and they’re never going to feel complete again because of these people. I was already in this with you, but now—I’m also angry.”

Booker nods decisively, reaches for his laptop. “So we take the historian’s list and do some of our own digging, find out where they keep the bodies.”

\--

The elation of their progress dissipates too quickly, leaving Nile with a prickle under her skin and too much time for introspection. At least when they’d waited for Silvia’s research, she knew that her inactivity was fitting. She can track insurgents and write a report clearly, but touching Joe’s aged book had reminded her right where she fit in the equation. She does not have the tools to draw a trajectory from a medieval rumour to a nineteenth century book to another fucking medical company. Reviewing Silvia’s drafted article confirms Nile’s opinions: she can see the words, but Silvia had spoken to them with a confidence that’s stripped bare by the methodical, careful arguments she structures in her written work.

Nile can help with the second leg in some ways. She’s the most comfortable with social media as the only person who’d ever chosen to use it—somehow it’s impossible to imagine Copley producing daily Insta stories—and she has a good nose for bullshit in the company press releases Copley drags up for inspection. When the process gets more technical, she keeps her sense of momentum in stasis by familiarizing herself with the sketchy history of intercision. She eats up two months by reading over the exhaustively compiled footnotes: newspaper clippings, renaissance portraits with addendum in the messy hand of a historian, and so many articles that she thinks she’s going to drown in the words.

Researching leaves her with a headache that hits and heals so quickly that it’s nausea-inducing in itself. Also: look at her life, she thinks. What was all that stuff about age coming with wisdom? Any faith in her own enlightenment has been crushed by her second family, who despite their willingness to adapt mission-quick to any _challenge_ , refuse to acknowledge the usefulness of Wikipedia in solving a factual disagreement. In her thirties, older but no wiser, she’d tested the extent of her childhood swimming lessons against all good sense when she’d gone in after Booker was shot overboard. She resigns herself to the fact that maybe being older is just being stupid in more complicated ways.

Aging also hasn’t brought patience. Chris’ settled form, more suited to movement and literally not down-to-earth, should have been a warning. Still, it’s weird to think that somewhere before she was killed in a side room, some part of him or her knew that he’d only feel more true as she advanced in years but failed to age. They start running again, sporadically accompanied by Quynh and Andy (who push the pace and turn Nile’s route into a pell-mell full contact course), Joe and Nicky (who insist on stopping for breakfast before returning home, regardless of the time of day) and even Booker (who reminds her that one should only run to or from something and probably has vodka in his opaque water bottle). She actually commits to learning Italian, finally, and then announces that she’s unlearning it and burning the dictionary when she walks in on Joe and Nicky in the mudroom of their most recent safehouse.

It had been hard enough to act cool when they were on vacation. Now, Nile can’t help but feel like she doesn’t deserve this respite. Even knowing that it’s a moment for stock-taking and someday soon she’ll look back on the missed opportunity for chocolate chip pancakes and want to smack at herself. Even if she’s doing what she should do, adjusting to find a place in the team that’s also bending and flexing to accommodate her, she’s bored.

She’s laying on the couch, out of direct sunlight because of the time of the day but still warmed by the air, and she’s thinking about names. It hadn’t been the most pressing issue at the time, but now she can’t stop thinking about her old life, tangled up in her real name.

“He called me Corporal Freeman,” she says to the roof. “He said he knew me by Christopher’s form. He didn’t know Booker, but he did know me.”

“My military records are a little more out of date,” Booker says gruffly. “We’ll scrub everything again when we get him. Don’t worry.”

Nile rises up, propped on her elbows. “If he knows me, he could know my family. He could hurt them. Even if I have to wait here, I should _warn_ them.”

“They’re being watched,” Joe says as if he’s offering a normal response. He’d barely looked at her, but something about the face she’s making involuntarily draws his attention back to her. “They’re important to you, Nile, so I wanted to be sure they were alright.”

“Besides, they’ll only be a liability for another few decades,” Quynh says. She’s never mentioned family at all beyond Andy and Lykon. She doesn’t get it, but Nile can’t have the fight with her. “Then you can both change your names and really start over.”

“I like my name,” Nile mutters. “And who renames their daemon?”

Nicky coughs awkwardly. “You know these are not our real names, Nile? My mother— ”

“—Bless her soul,” Joe interjects fervently.

“—did not name me Nicky, without a family name. I was Nicolo de Genova for longer than was sensible. When Joe and I decided to remain together, the four of us renamed the daemons as well to reflect less on our differing origins.”

“We read through our holy books,” Joe continues, “and when the ladies decided they liked the names, we let them have them.”

Nile, during her game of match-the-daemon that suddenly feels older than she does, had spent hours looking up the etymology of Miriam and Zipphora. She couldn’t even be sure that she’d spelled either correctly, but it turns out it didn’t matter.

“It was one of the first things we shared,” Nicky says, his voice gentling when he turns to Joe. “They knew before we did, helped us to find our common ground.”

“My name is a joke,” Baudelaire interrupts. “An author daemon for a book man, get it?”

Nile turns to Andy, though it’s a long shot that she’ll get common sense there. Andy raises her eyebrows and shrugs. “No one even speaks my language, why would I have the same name? We appropriated some from the Greeks and since the world has passed around an obsession with their writing, no one would call out Partitavus as being named out of place.”

“I could call myself whatever I want,” Nile says. As she turns the thought over in her head, it starts to feel more exciting than annoying or surprising.

“You can call me Steve Rogers,” Chris says immediately. He spreads his wings in his most heroic pose.

“I am, one hundred percent, not doing that,” Nile says without looking at him. Having an eagle daemon had been enough of a joke in the Marines without fully committing to the patriotic lifestyle.

“Why would you take a perfectly ordinary name and change it to two even more ordinary names?” Quynh asks with interest. Nile isn’t sure anyone is ready for the forty-part Marvel Universe experience, but maybe if they get out of this one.

Her mind catches again on “maybe.” She’s getting pretty used to surviving anything, but between the strange man with a hidden daemon and the molasses-slow wait of companies who think they know better than God, she feels uncomfortable. Uneasy.

“I’m not going to overthink it,” she says, trying to cling to the normalcy of the conversation. “I can just use a different set of synonyms every time, like Book. Amazon, Yangtze, Vogla. Mississippi Libertygal.”

“Yeah, definitely let her take over the fake ids,” Booker drawls. “She’s got a head for it. So natural.”

They sink back into silence. Nile appreciates them, the way that they share information so readily and how they try to make her laugh to lift her mood. But she hasn’t been called Corporal since the day Andy kidnapped her for her new life. The memory is still a sharp pain that she circles around, the last minute before a rollercoaster drop when she hadn’t gone over the edge. It’s been years and she’s still coming at it from the edges, teasing things apart.

The slack, disgusted line of Dizzy’s mouth. The chain of her dogtags sliding through her fingers when the Sergeant walked away. The pictures left on the wall next to her packed bag in the tent. The dappling of sunlight under the camouflage netting. The speed with which Andy had the gun from her hands and in her face.

She’s had bad days since then, it’s still one of the worst. Her mind still skips back to the first dreams, waking alone. Jay’s smile fading from her lips. Dizzy’s eyes. The Sergeant’s head tilt when he says she’s been ordered to Landstuhl. The labels on the medical equipment around her, looking freshly unpacked.

Her brain is picking at something in the scene. She tries to relax into it, to avoid the concentration crease that her mom used to smooth down between her eyes. Landstuhl is the military hospital, sure. Closer to that, and Chris stirs uneasily in her peripheral vision as Nile breathes in deeply through her nose and thinks of the medical tent again.

“I think it matters that he called me Corporal Freeman,” she says at last. She can hear them all shift to look at her but they don’t speak, give her the space to get her thoughts together. “I went MIA just before wheels up in Afghanistan to send me for further testing. Even if the records sent home say KIA, someone knew something was up with me before I did. And now someone looks at my damn face and gives me a rank but calls Booker by an alias?”

“Cross-reference the company locations with high status transfers from military medicine,” Andy says low and quiet. “Honourable or dishonourable discharge. Did time overseas. Potentially an expat who remained in Europe after their service.”

Nile feels her eyes start to burn unexpectedly. “I was never going to get to go home, was I,” she says to the roof. She can’t look at them; she can already imagine the look on each of them, anyway, from Booker’s uncomfortable head tilt away to the unwarranted softness of Andy’s face. Breathes in through the nose, holds the air in her lungs.

Booker says, “Frankfurt.”

Everyone else moves out to handle the usual business of cleaning up a safehouse and packing for a new mission. Nile nearly jumps out of her skin when a hand lands on her shoulder. Quynh hadn’t left at all, had lingered to silently come closer. She squeezes Nile tight and doesn’t offer any platitudes or apologies. It sinks Nile back into her skin and she wipes her eyes hard before going to wipe down the bathroom for prints.

There’s some friction in deciding on how to act on the new intel. Joe, Nicky, and Booker are more pliable than most men she’s known. It’s an ego thing, like a rich guy who drives a Hyundai because he doesn’t care how much more people would look at him if he had a BMW. They all know they’re hot shit, and they also know that Andy is a magnitude hotter. Nile hasn’t had a second where she thought someone else was in charge of that team, no matter who’s on point.

She knows that adding her was destabilizing, maybe even more than Andy’s mortality and Booker’s betrayal. She knows how to follow orders, but she wants to do good things. In some briefings, she got the sense that Joe and Nicky had decided so long ago to trust their guts when it came to the right thing that they didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the options. Tell them there’s a child in danger and they’re prepared to wade in. It might be a relic of the pre-digital era, the idea that they find a problem, fix it, and move on to the next one. Andy took the lead on selecting missions and they helped organize them and they did missions, like it was a linear process.

And if Nile questioning and arguing and leading them in different ways—and they’re always happy to change, to listen to alternate theories and weigh them with respect—has changed the team, Quynh’s return took a good swing at knocking their rulebook out the window. Quynh is just as principled as any of them and three times more stubborn than Andy.

Nile has time to reflect on these things because she said her piece early in the fight and isn’t particularly invested in the fine print of another Andy-and-Quynh verbal sparring match. Andy isn’t wrong that Nile, Quynh and Booker have been burned for any sort of stealth insertion by the fact that they’d been face to face with someone high up in the organization they’re currently trying to enter. And yet, the thought of waiting from a distance rubs Nile the wrong way, gives Quynh enough friction to light her on fire. Andy gets to be first in the door, but she can’t tell them to stay out of the house.

It’s obvious Andy had thought she’d be taking the smaller team in when they convene in the room she’s rented on an upper floor of an office building. It’s like a clown car. Joe has to sit crosslegged on the desk holding their tablet, with both Miriam and Zipphora curled up tight below him on the floor, before Booker can even lock the door behind them.

“This’ll work?” Andy asks Nicky. Andy doesn’t sulk, but Nile has also received warmer looks from their fearless leader. It doesn’t help that Andy is dressed up in the most intimidatingly smoking-hot pantsuit, looking like an Exec ready to merge or synergize or possibly trap-door low level staff into a pit with crocodiles.

Nicky could have told them from the street that the angle will work, but he’s a professional. While Nile had been trying not to step on Quynh’s toes, he’d swapped the decent quality swivel chair for a hardpacked plastic one by the window and settled down with his rifle sighted along the sill. He murmurs, “Yes, good” in Italian without looking away from his scope.

“I just want to say,” Nile says carefully, “that I may have a recognizable face, but choosing between a horse daemon and none at all isn’t the soul of discretion either.”

Andy smirks at her. “You thought I hadn’t considered that? Joe, what’s your range these days?”

“Mmm, half a football field. Maybe less if it gets stressful.” Joe has pulled a Clark Kent for his IT tech disguise and spent ten minutes redoing his tie to get a look he’d described distractedly as ‘incompetent appropriate dress code.’ The short end of the tie is peeking out from behind and Nile can tell that it’s driving Joe crazy.

“Then we’ll send you and Miriam in five minutes ahead of me. That shouldn’t hurt anyone, and I’ll adjust the scene if it turns out the servers are deeper in the building than the plans indicate.”

Miriam shifts from her normal lax wolf-sprawl to her best impression of a dog. It largely seems to involve more tongue-lolling and a head tilt that’s recognizable from any YouTube ‘cute animal’ compilation worth its salt. Joe holds out his hand for Booker to pass the equipment.

Booker reaches out and then pulls it back sharply. “Don’t lose this. I’m serious Joe.”

“I don’t usually lose them,” Joe says cheerfully. “The last one was completely whole.”

“It was more than whole, you had set it in a jello mould. I’m begging you, just bring it back the way you got it.”

Booker doesn’t look reassured when Joe shoots off a salute and smirks, but he doesn’t press any further. Joe slings a backpack over one shoulder and heads out with Miriam at his heels. He’s in character by the time he’s out the door, actually goes over to the crosswalk and waits for the light to change. It’s easy for Nile to forget that he’s not a big man, but seeing him in a crowd of suits with his shoulders hunched up gives her a pang of surprising and entirely unjustified protectiveness.

Andy waits as they watch Joe fumble and radiate good cheer while producing his cloned pass for the guards. He doesn’t glance back as he’s escorted to the elevator, and then he’s gone from view. Andy glances at her watch to begin the countdown.

“Remember, if you are out of contact for more than five minutes we will come in,” Quynh says. It’s the compromise she’d whittled Andy down to: five minutes is enough time to solve a problem on her own, but short enough that no one could get them offsite if something went wrong again.

Andy leans down to kiss her, actually smiles. “If me and Regina can’t scare these kids out of their pants, you can come and show them who’s boss.”

“Regina?” Nile asks, but Andy’s headed to the door. Surprisingly, Zipphora shakes herself awake and heads after her. Nile hasn’t seen Nicky without a daemon unless Joe’s in the process of un-dying, and even knowing that both daemons come and go together doesn’t stop the strangeness of seeing Nicky without any companion.

“So when you said that you couldn’t separate like Andy and Party,” she says. Nicky hums but doesn’t look away from his task, so Nile turns to Booker.

“They’re weird,” he says without looking up from his own computer. She puts her hands on her hips and waits. “It’s some kind of free range thing, we don’t know how it works. As long as they’ve got one daemon near one of them they’re both fine. Besides, they both have pretty long ranges. Zipphora will probably switch off from Nicky to Joe when he cross the street and thus.”

He waves a hand to encompass all of Andy’s Andyness, now with bonus lioness shadow. It does look damn impressive.

“I need to get me an immortal soulmate,” Nile grumbles and picks up the binoculars to spot for Nicky.

Andy has transformed herself into a pillar of entitled Karen-style rage by the time she’s across the street, and Zipphora has worked herself past her usual bored slump to sit like a queen at her side. Nile watches guards pick up the phones, summoning a series of employees in progressively fancy suits as Andy plants herself in the middle of the room and gesticulates.

She almost misses Joe’s reemergence. He’s still radiating less of the energy than she expects from him, and he’s got both hands deep in his pockets and Miriam tight on his heels. Andy keeps up the game for a few more minutes after he’s out the door and onto the first bus at a nearby stop. Then, she appears to be collecting business cards, which she still waves threateningly in the face of the unfortunate middle manager who’s tried unsuccessfully to draw her from her position in the central lobby.

Booker falls out as Andy exits stage left to provide support if things go south at the last minute. He passes Andy as she hails a cab and then walks until he’s out of view around the corner.

“Clear,” Nile says. Nicky is breaking down his rifle before she’s got her mouth closed again, passing bullets off to Quynh to hide in a voluminous purse and transferring the scope to Nile’s camera bag. Booker wasn’t lying about the separation thing, even with neither of their daemons even on the same block he seems completely unperturbed. Nile lets him and Quynh go first so she can make sure they clear the scene, and then hangs a camera around her neck and puts on her best American-in-Europe face and keeps her stride slow as she begins her circuitous route back to the safehouse.

\--

“This place makes me miss Afghanistan,” Nile announces as she belly crawls up on Joe’s left. She can’t see the smile he probably makes for her between her own goggles and the thick fur lining of his hood.

“What, Chicago wasn’t this balmy?” he asks, passing her his binoculars. She sights down them at the compound spread out east and below them. The only movement she can pick out is the way the light catches differently as snow blows through the chain-link exterior fence.

“Too cold for banter,” Nicky reports from Joe’s other side. Enough snow has settled on him, too, that he’s more an allusion to a sniper than an actual person. Miriam, the only daemon who braved or bothered to leave the Arctic truck, snuffles a laugh.

Nile doesn’t want to say out loud how restless she is. The place is large enough to be a boss battle, maybe, but they can’t tell from the outside if it’s a skeleton crew or a fighting force. This is the best lead from Joe’s data retrieval, though. If nothing else they can burn another of these disgusting places to the ground, and if they close enough entrances they’ll eventually flush out the rats.

“Just checking in on my favourite dudes,” she says and winces when it comes out as the very opposite of casual. Dudes, nice one Nile.

Joe laughs quietly this time, takes the binoculars back and settles into spotting again. “I’m seeing internal guards only, fifteen minute patrols. Cameras are focused on the doorways. Everything points in. Andy will call it soon, no use freezing our asses off hoping that they decide to come out and make snow angels.”

“Want me to take over for a bit?” she asks. She’s learned competence with the rifle, if not the patience to excel at the job. Second best shot in the team, even if she’s not going to be making any of Nicky’s stupidly casual trick shots any time this century. “You guys can go in and defrost, send Booker out to spot for me.”

“I think if we move now our bodies will become aware of the circumstances,” Joe says cheerfully. “But thank you, Nile. Have a mug of hot chocolate for me."

She scoots herself backwards until the compound vanishes behind the small swell of the hill, then pushes herself up and hurries back to the vehicle.

“Shut the fucking door,” Booker shouts before she’s even got it open enough to climb inside. It’s too cold to make a joke of leaving it open, but Nile doesn’t miss an opportunity to press her frozen fingers to his cheek as she walks past to Andy and the hard copies of the mission info. Booker swears emphatically in Russian, which is a nice dramatic touch probably intended to inspire guilt in her.

Like most research facilities that aren’t supposed to exist on what is arguably international territory, the details of the site interior are lacking. Copley found it well shielded despite multiple satellite passes and Booker had dug up a few internal memos from building companies. The best they have is the confirmation that it’s mostly concrete and well insulated and that it’s only one floor above ground. Even in high school, Nile had better info to prep for tests.

Her neck always wants to tighten up before missions, and now she can feel her shoulders creeping up a millimeter at a time. It’s because this is important to her, she knows. There’s doing the right thing and there’s knowing that today specifically is important. She knows the faces of children who’ve been hurt by these people, and she knows that revenge will be more than blowing the building and everything in it sky high. Somehow (she knows how) in the last few years her default final plan has been shoot-to-kill and today she won’t even allow it on her list, has convinced the others to do the same.

She gets herself the promised mug of hot chocolate, relays Nicky and Joe’s update to Andy. Quynh, seated with her legs curled under her on the opposite end of the couch from Booker and checking her sword meticulously, laughs.

“Oh, Andromache. How terrible, to go into a situation blind without all the cameras and heat seekers and guns.” The teasing provokes a wide open smile from Andy that Nile is increasingly accustomed to, thanks to Quynh.

They pull the final pieces of their gear together with the slow pre-mission focus that Nile has learned to integrate into her own behavior. She keeps most of her guns under her outer layer, then tucks Chris inside as well to be on the safe side. He whined constantly about the extremes of heat in Afghanistan, so it’s not a stretch to assume that if this cold didn’t hurt him, it would at least make him insufferable.

Zipphora, to her surprise, takes the opportunity to roll in the snow as they make their way over to Joe and Nicky. Some of the snow’s crust sticks to her, which is probably as close to camouflage as they can hope for. Besides, the weird way that the snow peaks and divots in the twilight is enough to give Nile a headache and she’s not the one half-assedly guarding an Arctic island from intruders. She keeps close as they split for the approach and come back together, realizes she’s holding her breath when she’s watching Booker cut through the wire fence. Her breath mists in the air on her purposeful, slow exhale.

There’s no one in the hallway where they make entry. Nile is officially starting to get the skin-crawling something’s wrong feeling, but hell if she’s going to be the one to say “this doesn’t feel right” and be offed by a fucking serial killer when the lights go out. Instead, she shucks her outer layer while Nicky, Booker and Quynh keep guard, then does the same so they can switch and pile the snowsuits close to the door. It’s not a perfect solution if they’re driven out the wrong way, but she couldn’t think of a better one.

The first split is a tee intersection, an unmarked hallway without doors that leads in both directions to blind corners. Andy tilts her head, just barely, to the right, and they split into groups of three. Nile takes point, Nicky and Joe fall in behind her. Clearing the rooms feels almost routine, one of the only activities that links her before-life with her new career as an immortal do-good mercenary. Room after room is recently abandoned, papers fluttering under the vents and full mugs of coffee left on the corners of tables. It’s mostly offices, but there’s also a classroom with perfectly positioned desks minus one tipped-over chair near the front.

She doesn’t recognize that the room she’s entered is occupied for a full heartbeat. The children, wearing matching grey-blue jumpsuits, have frozen like statues. They’re not even hiding. It’s quiet enough that she can hear the hitched breath of forced-silent crying. Nile nearly drops her gun completely in her haste to lower it and get her free hand up in a calming gesture.

“Hi everyone, my name is Nile and we’re here to help you. Is everyone okay?”

She looks closely at the face of the nearest one, compares the boy to Ava and the children they’d found on that first awful mission. The kids here are pallid, almost grayish, but it seems more like a lack of sunshine than a fundamental absence. A tiny head peeks out of his jumpsuit collar, the glistening beady eyes of a ferret. They’re not too late.

“Do our parents know you’re here?” a girl demands, pushing past the taller children with an easy authority. “Do you know who these people are, do you know what they did with Melody or Jon or Landon or—“

Nicky has gone down on one knee, pushed his gun around by its strap so he can pin it loosely to the side with his left arm. “We’re here to learn these things,” he says gently. “But we need your help.”

The children clamour to provide information, shouting over each other to describe mundane things like food and terrifyingly precise things like the guards’ surveillance cycles. When it comes to the subject of the unexplored end of the hall, they trail off until the first girl speaks again.

“We don’t like that door. It’s evil. No one ever comes back from that door.”

They can’t afford to lose one of them to protecting the kids, but Nicky quickly explains how to brace a bed against the door and the children turn the lights off, disappearing unnervingly like ghosts as they move away from the door’s window.

Nile thinks that the kids weren’t wrong about the scary door. It’s slightly taller than the others they’ve seen, and both the frame and the door are a dull metal. If they were in a horror movie, there would be one of those low discordant bass lines playing as they walked closer. And, of course, it’s solid: no window to indicate that what’s on the other side isn’t somehow worse than the gateway containing it.

“I’ll go in first,” Nile says. It’s the only time she gets to, since Andy and Quynh usually race to get into trouble. “Nicky, if you follow right behind me I can shield if there’s anything hinky. Joe, you watch our backs until we’ve secured the room.”

Joe nods and drops to a knee, gun raised but shoulders loose as he watches back the way they came. Miriam drops down next to him, tense in a stalking position rather than her normal sprawl. Nicky cups Nile’s elbow very gently when she reaches for the door.

“If we are playing human shield, then I should lead.” He gives his tiny half-smile at the look Nile can’t control on her face. “As much as I trust your military skill, you fit much better behind me than the reverse.”

He’s not wrong, so Nile shifts back half a step to let Nicky and Zipphora up to the door. They hold eye contact for a long moment, and then Nicky twists the handle and shoves firmly, gun ready as he makes entry. Nile is on his heels, twisting to view first the exposed right corner of the room and then the left as it comes into view when the door bounces open completely against the wall.

Nicky slumps back against her when the first few shots connect. Nile gets her arm around his waist to steady him and keep him up, feeling only a flicker of guilt at his gasp of pain. She gets the shooters in her sights and takes them out tidily, double taps each chest in her sweep. By the time the last person falls, Nicky is limp in her arms. She stops herself from checking his pulse and lays him out gently instead, walks over to close and secure the door on the other side of the fresh corpses.

Nicky chokes back to life, full body twitch moving immediately into a crunch that moves him into a sitting position. Nile braces herself against the door, even if no one’s trying to open it yet. He has a hand pressed to the point in his chest where his ribs crack apart, but gives her a thumbs up when he catches sight of her. She grins back, feeling the manic edge of the smile. “Thanks. Clear, Joe.”

Joe and Miriam enter backwards, toeing the door shut behind them before lowering the gun. Nile reacts before either of them when she notices that the room is one daemon short.

Miriam catches on next, making a soft frantic noise that turns into a keen. “Zipphora?”

It’s useless to scan the room, but Nile does anyway. There are no hiding places for a lioness, and there are no lioness daemons in surprising places. Zipphora is completely gone.

She’s thanked God for their combined experience before, but Nile realizes that this is the moment that the bones-deep training is the only thing keeping her friends on their feet. Metaphorically, because Nicky is still on the floor and Joe has dropped to a knee. Nicky’s hand on his chest is white from the pressure he’s applying on himself and Nile can imagine the fingerprint-whorl bruises he’s not leaving time to heal on his sternum.

“Maybe it’s just slowed down,” she says helplessly because the silence is beyond oppressive.

It’s not the same as the separated children they’ve saved through this too-fucking-long mission. Joe’s face has been remolded, the familiar laugh lines slid down his face to form agonized furrows at the corners of his mouth. Nicky, who flushes and blanches as fast as clouds cross the sun, is a uniform whey colour. They begin speaking fast in the jumbled long-dead tongues they keep for themselves, Joe’s voice cracking and Nicky’s fading to a whisper like he’s working with a collapsed lung.

“She’s gone,” Nicky says finally in English. “We can’t feel her.”

Nile’s neurons fire in response, a flash of full-body pain like being dipped in fire. She doesn’t want to know but has to ask, “Is that possible.”

The look they share is new and unreadable, all the amusement and strength stripped out of them until she sees the sinews and force of will that have held them together for nearly a century. Joe shakes his head slowly, pushes himself to stand up and stumbles hard backwards. He stops when his back hits the wall, chest lurching like he’s gone five rounds with Andy. Nicky doesn’t make the same effort, doesn’t even make the familiar reach for his gun she’s seen a thousand times in his combat revivals.

They’re goddamn professionals, but this is a new level of hell. Nile thinks if she asked them where they were, what they were doing, they wouldn’t be able to answer right now. They look scraped clean and stunned more than upset, but Nile can predict the beginning of a breakdown pretty well. If they don’t move soon, she’s going to lose them to this room. Never mind the mission, even though the urgency is peaking in the form of a pressure headache, if they don’t move forward she’s never going to get them out of this room.

“Miriam, with me on this door,” she says and keeps her voice level like she’s asking for help finding the cutlery in a new safehouse. “Joe, keep watching our tail. Nicky, how’s your ammo?”

Nicky is the only one who ever has a sense of how many bullets he and Joe have left. He blinks at her, wide eyed as a child, and then lifts his gun and hefts the weight carefully. When she nods encouragingly at him he staggers to his feet to study the abandoned weapons from the guards. Nile gives him time, longer than he’d normally need, and then nods sharply. He grabs a new rifle from the middle fleet of men she’d taken out, someone who’d been surprised by his comrades falling before him and barely squeezed his trigger before she knocked him back and down with a bullet to the neck. Joe follows a step behind, but he’s staggering like he’s been shot in the knee. Nile thinks it’s a very good thing that it’s unlikely anyone will sneak up behind them.

She moves them through the next two rooms at a brutal clip, faster than she’d normally feel comfortable. Miriam tries to keep pace but is walking like her feet are suddenly too big or sore for her body. She takes an uncharacteristic shot to the haunch when a straggling guard aims at her before the humans behind her, and her teeth snap on empty air where they’d normally connect with the meat of his calf. Nile moves forward past her without a word, takes point herself even if she and Chris aren’t meant for this kind of close combat, the restricted flight space. She has to protect Miri, but part of it is also selfish. She can’t watch the daemon move without a sympathetic agony in the pit of her stomach.

Zipphora’s absence is almost a physical thing, sucking Nile’s attention when she doesn’t focus herself on their momentum. When she looks back to make sure Joe and Nicky are still with her, they look somehow worse than in the first moments of Nicky’s revival. He’s got his gun steady but there’s a sheen of fever sweat on his brow, the neck of his hoodie clinging damply to his neck and chest. Joe has abandoned the gun and has his scimitar in both hands, grip comfortable but every line in his shoulders reflecting the posture of a man who’s outnumbered and prepared to go out when he spends the last of his energy.

Old, she thinks again. We killed each other, many times. It had been a joke but now she can see it, the intimate spin of their orbits knocked off course and leaving two vulnerable teammates where they’d started with a natural unit. The nausea of daemon-wrongness has returned for a first time in a long time, another draw on her frayed nerves and focus. It takes her a moment to realize the room isn’t _empty_ after she’s cleared each corner for threats.

The machine is hatefully familiar, even if they’ve changed the style and the colour code. The child daemon is a flicker of movement in its cage, going from bird to mammal to lizard and back as fast as Nile can blink. Chris swoops over to comfort it, bracing himself against the fine mesh of the cage’s top as he speaks. The girl hasn’t said a word, and is restrained instead of caged. The straps are too wide to look right on her, as if anything could, but have her so immobilized that all she can move for is a hair-fine tremor.

“It’s okay, kiddo,” Nile says, moving towards the girl immediately as the only person in this team who isn’t flirting with a catatonic shock. “We’re here to help you.”

She’s got one of the kid’s feet undone when the door bangs open and the firing starts. She doesn’t even form a conscious thought as she vaults up onto the table, Chris has fanned his wings, protective but ineffective, over the cage. Nile settles herself over the girl, pressed tighter on the side of the shooters but a more effective shield than her daemon. There is a second if she wonders if this is it for them, and then a pain.

When Nile gasps back to life, the girl is crying loudly and Christopher is gone too. The bullets ease out of her skin. One remains tangled in the fabric, sliding down to press lightly against her lower back when she levers herself off the girl to stand. The guards are dead and the door is propped closed, but Joe is hunched over wheezing like he’s run a marathon and Nicky is braced on the wall, holding his rifle like a lifeline.

“Status?” Nile croaks, going back to the straps on the table. The hollowness she’d only ever felt when she and Chris pushed their separation boundary is back, and it’s leaking a desolate soreness out into the rest of her body. She has to keep going.

“What in the literal and actual fuck is this place,” Joe groans. “Why the fuck are people so awful.”

“I’m here,” Nicky adds. “Whole—“ and Nile can hear the catch in his voice. “We seem to still be physically recovering.”

"Great. Good news,” Nile says briskly. Her eyes burn for a second, but her vision steadies after she squeezes them tightly closed. “We have to be close to the centre of the compound. We keep moving.”

She really thinks this is the moment that Joe and Nicky will break formation. The only time they’ll lose themselves out of any of the stories they’ve told her or any of the misadventures she’s experienced with them. That’s saying plenty, because the second time she’d ever met them they’d been strapped crucifix-style to lab tables. She and Nicky once spent five hours digging Joe out of a collapsed building. They’d both cried well into the credits of _the Fox and the Hound_. She’s never seen them drawn so thin and exhausted as they are now.

She feels bad for doubting them when they both nod sharply at her. It isn’t the same, Joe still moves like a puppet with cut strings and Nicky holds his gun up with what is obviously only force of will and muscle memory, but it’ll have to do. They fall out again, and she’s so aware of how the silence is strained instead of mission-comfortable. She stays in the lead, notices that instead of their normal spread Nicky is hanging back to shield Joe. She can’t tell if Joe has noticed and thinks it’s the right call, or is too out of it himself to notice the shift in formation.

Nile can hear her own unsteady breaths, the relentless pounding of blood in her ears. They slow because she can’t focus, not quite. She keeps checking over her shoulder, and Chris is not there. She’s grown accustomed to faster bursts of pain, spoiled by her rapid healing. There’s nothing to do but grit her teeth through the pressure pain in the pads of her feet at every step, the way her clothes chafe and prickle at her skin every time she twists to take in the room. Overlaying everything is the throbbing emptiness, still stretching like a blood infection out of the place where a part of Chris has always lived inside her heart to methodically infect every inch of her body.

She’s not cautious now, in a way that should scare her. She opens doors fully without checking, doesn’t crouch to keep her surface area low for any shooters. She’s wide stanced and prepared for any further physical injury, because what could be worse than this. And in the last room, there is the bland, awful man who’d spoken to them when they’d been captured is in the last room. It’s like finding the final boss in a video game when you’d hoped to reach a normal save point so you could turn the fucking thing off for a night. His shirt is off by one button but everything else seems collected. Keen eyes take her in comprehensively, possessively. He looks happy to see them.

“Corporal, welcome back,” he says cheerfully. “And you’ve brought some new friends, though I must say they look even worse off than your last bunch.”

“Fuck you,” Nicky says, each sound bitten off harshly.

“I haven’t even introduced myself yet,” the man says smarmily. He’s not alone, obviously, there are men staggered around the room with guns pointed at Nile, Joe, and Nicky. Nile is pretty sure she feels her brain throb when she tries to think of a course of action. They need him alive, they need to stay alive, Miriam is the only daemon they have left between them and if they die again—

Andy kicks in the door on the other side of the room, labrys up and pistol extended.

“Thank god,” Nile breathes out hard. The man turns to take in the new sight, again unperturbed.

“More friends. You’re a popular woman, Corporal Freeman. I can’t help but notice one of your old associates is absent, however. What was his name, Christopher?”

Nile briefly sees red, adjusts her grip on the gun even though she’s already holding it so tight that her knuckles ache. “What the fuck did you do to them,” she says. It comes out more desperate than threatening, but she’s still doing better than the men behind her or Miriam, who has uncharacteristically huddled herself behind Nile’s legs.

“Nothing that can’t be undone, if you put your guns down now,” he says smoothly. His breast pocket wriggles and a small head pops up. A guinea pig. She’s in a faceoff with a man and a guinea pig daemon and she can’t just kill him.

The pressure of Andy’s gaze distracts her for a moment. Nile can count on one hand the times she’s seen Andy’s eyes that soft, and it brings her an inch closer to tears. She’s letting Nile make the call, not drawing attention to herself. And Nile knows, just like she knew that she would cover the girl even if it cost her Chris, that there’s only one choice to make.

She flings herself forward and tackles the man down as the shooting starts. He’s not strong and definitely hasn’t gained a decade’s experience fighting against the most talented warriors in the world. Nile gets him hard in the stomach and pins his throat with an arm bar, and his men don’t even hit her once before Andy, Joe and Nicky have them incapacitated.

Andy is kneeling at her side, then, with the same look in her eyes. She passes over zip ties that Nile applies too tightly to his wrists. She never even asked his name, he never offered anything more than creepy threats and an overbearing overtone of sexual harassment. She’s still pinning him in a way that would hurt every point of pressure between her body and his, but she makes sure to get in a last sharp dig with her knee to his guts when Andy helps her stand.

“Quynh and Booker are securing the rest of the scientists. They were hiding in a meat locker.” Andy offers her a small smile. “Looks like you drew the short straw and got the loaded route. Sorry, kid.”

“We died and they didn’t come back,” Nile says, as if that were a question Andy had asked. Her mentor looks over her shoulder at Joe and Nicky, then back to Nile.

“C’mon, this asshole will keep.”

Andy fits an arm around her waist and leads them all back the way she’d come, stepping over the corpse of a man and holding the door for Joe and Nicky to go past them. The men make it halfway into the room and seem to collapse in slow motion, away from each other instead of their usual coming together. There’s a disturbingly unusual space between them when they prop themselves against the lab bench, still in arm’s reach but without the sense of magnetic pull that Nile’s grown to take for granted.

She wants to follow their lead, but instead she turns and squats carefully next to Miriam. She’s seen Nicky and Joe do the check almost more times than she can count, already. Following the memory, she traces her fingers along Miriam’s muzzle and then comfortingly over her ears, like a test the daemon is still whole. Miriam is still whimpering, but she rises from her miserable crouch under the attention. She settles at equidistance between Nicky and Joe, empty space to either of her side without Zipphora to squeeze into the gaps.

Nicky reaches out and curls his hand familiarly in her ruff. In the same moment, Joe slides a hand from the crown of her head down her neck. Their hands settle in the same spot, and Nile feels something unknot inside her when they tangle their fingers carefully together above Miriam’s spine.

She loses time for a moment, and then she’s seated against the wall and Booker and Quynh are there, close but not touching.

Booker reaches over tentatively and rests his hand over hers. His voice is careful and soft when he asks, “Intercision?”

“Worse,” Nile says and her vision blurs and greys out. She must be crying, but the pain is so bad that she can’t tell if the tears on her face are real. “We died and they didn’t come back. They’re gone.”

Booker pulls her in, leans his forehead against hers and keeps a hand on her neck. It’s stabilizing, which is important because he and the wall seem to be the only thing stopping Nile from collapsing in on herself. Still, each vertebrae hurts from the tension of her seizing neck and shoulder muscles and her breathing seems to be all noise and no oxygen. Booker murmurs to her softly in French, the kind of soothing that he must have used for his kids so long ago.

“I killed him,” Nile forces out. Her hands go out to where Christopher should be, land on the cool tile of the floor to her left. Then, because the consequences are too large to chip apart for even one specific: “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“We’re going to get out of here,” Andy says in her best boss voice. Nile blinks hard over Booker’s shoulder and sees Andy hauling Nicky up like an over-tired puppy. She transfers the force of her movement when he has upwards momentum, wraps her arm tight around Nicky’s waist and gets a shoulder into his armpit to hold him steady.

It would be nice if Andy would lie and say something comforting, but that isn’t the world they’re in. Nile accepts Booker’s hand but stands on her own merit, pushes him gently to retrieve Joe from where the other man has curled on top of Miri like a sack of bones. The fatigue that hits Nile is familiar but worse, the crackling sense of having overdrawn her energy combining with the pain that refuses to retreat for even long enough for Nile to sooth her racing heart.

Andy takes them straight back to their snowsuits while Booker and Quynh do a final sweep of the facility and initiate the process of radioing for rescue of the children. Nile thinks she sees the girl who’d directed them to the intercision room, sees the wet tracks on the child’s cheeks and the guilt in her eyes, but she doesn’t have enough juice left to form a coherent sentence let alone be comforting. Instead, she lets Andy redress her like a doll, only doubles over for a moment when her jacket is zipped and the fresh agony of an empty place where Chris should be hits her.

“Can you three walk?” Andy asks brusquely. Nile nods hard and then stills until the dizziness fades.

“Got it, boss,” Joe says unconvincingly. He takes a step towards the door and Nile moves to brace him when he trips over the floor. The pressure they apply to each other neutralizes the way both had been about to fall and she feels more stable than she has since she vaulted onto that medical table. Joe amends himself, only the faintest ghost of his normal humour in his tone, “We have each other.”

Andy resecures her grip on Nicky and leads the way out. The first blast of cold snow makes Nile gasp like it’s an ice bath, flinching up as Joe hunches down into her side. Again, they level each other out. She keeps her eyes on Andy’s back like she’s Eurydice, scared in a new way of the vast emptiness of this tundra. There are no landmarks, she could die and freeze out here and if she loses them she’ll be truly alone for the first time—

They’ve been in the facility long enough that sunrise is teasing with the horizon. It doesn’t particularly help Nile, the predawn light dapples and wavers over the lines they’re drawing as they walk through the snow and makes her more dizzy and less confident in her steps. Joe is talking to himself quietly in Arabic, though she can’t tell now if he’s cursing or comforting himself.

She doesn’t mean to wobble off course, but the incline beneath their feet feels like too much, pulling at the backs of their calves with an unfamiliar agony, so they sway themselves along the level path with their eyes back on the diverging line of Andy’s back. And then she lands a foot on the snow crust that keeps going.

Nile has fallen before. This time, she doesn’t scream. Maybe she’s relieved.

She hears Andy yelling their names before any of her other senses come back, and then her femur moves slickly beneath her skin and cracks back into place. Beside her, she hears the recognizable, faintly protesting groan of Joe’s reanimation. She squints up and there’s the beautiful blue-and-white of a wall of ice, the faint crack of sunlight above broken by the silhouette of Andy’s head.

And a divebombing shape, so familiar that it makes every molecule of Nile’s body sing. Christopher crushes a rib again when he lands too hard on her but she doesn’t care, rolling with him and crying and spitting up blood onto the bank of snow next to them. There’s a scrape of paws against snow and she sees another fall, Miriam bouncing once off the wall and then tumbling down near Joe, on top of Zipphora. Joe laughs, disbelieving and wide and loud. Somewhere distantly she hears Andy swearing and shouting Nicky’s name. A final drift of snow kicks over the edge and lands to melt slowly on her face, and she’s holding Chris.

“Don’t do that,” he says, beak tearing into her snowsuit over her heart.

“We’re not done here,” she says. She promises, to her beautiful ridiculous daemon, shivering on top of her like he’s been gone a hundred years. When she sits up slowly she can’t find Joe at first for the daemon pile on top of him, recognizes one of his boots peeking out from below Miriam’s tail. He’s still laughing, incredulously and wetly.

“You fucking idiots,” Andy shouts down at them. Nile leans her head back and grins hopelessly at her. “Don’t move, Booker is coming.”

Joe tries to get her and Chris to take the first trip up, but Nile can’t do that to him or Nicky. Instead, they winch Zipphora first, then Miriam, then Joe. When Nile is pulled over the lip of the crevasse by Booker and Quynh, the first thing she sees is the reformed pile of daemons and medieval aged men, shaking from emotions and the cold and clutching hopelessly at each other.

Andy wraps her up in the biggest, warmest hug Nile can remember since she left her mother. Her eyes are glossy too as she leans back, squeezes Nile’s neck in her familiar way. She admits, like pulling teeth, “You scared me.”

“I’d do it again,” Nile says honestly. Chris’ form is about to become a waste because she’s never going to let him go far enough to fly again. “Andy, I—“

Andy leans their foreheads together and Nile matches her breaths, holds still until Andy gently swipes the tears off her cheeks and stands back with her hands on her hips.

“It’ll be an embarrassment for all of us if we freeze to death out here,” she announces. “Do you two think you can walk again?”

Nicky and Joe still seem less than steady when they rise, but they’re leaning on each other again. Miriam is more hindrance than help, threading through their legs and jumping on Zipphora’s back, barking and howling her pleasure. Nile accepts Booker’s supportive arm this time, leans her head on his shoulder as he guides and Andy shepherds them back to the truck. There must have been a discussion about who’ll drive but Nile isn’t party to it.

Quynh helps Nile untangle herself from the mangled suit, cleans her face and neck roughly with a damp cloth and wraps her in the fuzziest towel in their possession. Nile can’t translate the look in her eyes, but Quynh projects her own love with every firm, practical movement in bundling Nile up. She tweaks one of Nile’s braids, slipped free from her bun in the excitement, and then kisses Nile’s forehead with a loud smacking noise.

Nile wakes on her side, starting to sweat from the warmth. On the cot across from her she can see the tapered lines of Nicky’s back, Joe’s palm squarely over the centre of his spine with his fingers spread in a possessive grab. Miriam has threaded herself through their tangled legs in a way that can’t be comfortable to anyone. At the head of the bed, Zipphora glances up from her work to snort affectionately at Nile. Nicky’s hair is all cowlicks from where Zipphora had groomed him, and the lioness has turned her attention to flattening down Joe’s disheveled curls.

“Are we going to be alright?” Nile asks quietly.

“I’ll wake you up when we hit the airfield,” Booker promises from outside of her line of sight. Baudelaire, unusually up and walking herself, sniffs loudly at Nile’s face once and then presses her forehead gently between Chris’ wings before walking silently away. Nile adjusts them, strokes her face against the softer feathers just above Chris’ eyes, and sleeps again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nile Freeman - Christopher, golden eagle  
> Andromache the Scythian - Party Horse, known officially as Partitavus the horse.  
> Booker - Baudelaire (red fox)  
> Joe & Nicky - Zipphora (lioness) and Miriam (wolf)  
> Copley - unnamed cat, aka Catley.  
> Quynh - Thủy Tinh (king cobra)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it, that's all. Thank you for joining me on this ride.
> 
> As I mentioned last chapter, I've written one more fic in this universe. However, I really enjoy it and am in no hurry to leave it behind, so if there are things past present or future that you'd like to read about, leave a comment and I'll see what I can do to make it happen. :)

“No,” Nile says when they pull into view of their current hideaway. Whines, more accurately, but who can blame her.

The team has a wide range of safe houses, long and short term investment or high or low quality interiors. Nile knows part of the factor is who’s choosing the location: Andy literally likes a cave, Nicky insists on a functional kitchen, Quynh is prone to high buildings with delicate curtains. Nile had missed the fight over their next location, just like she’d missed most of their retreat from the science base. It’d be fair to assume that they would end up with Copley, watching the tail end of the mission play out in his Batman cave.

Instead, this.

Everyone knows that Russia is big. No one Nile has ever gone to school with, she thinks, would ever have been able to name a city outside of European Russia, given that Siberia is actually a region. It makes for a good hiding spot if you really don’t want to stumble across a familiar face. The population density is nonexistent, their closest neighbours look like they’ve never eaten at McDonalds let alone seen a tourist.

The house may not be Andy levels of misery, but it’s definitely rated a mid-century-slump Booker or maybe a HDTV-binge Joe. Which is to say, despite the warmth she feels every time her fingers brush any part of Chris’s still-present body, Nile is beyond disappointed at her new surroundings. They have a series of hotplates instead of a stove, and the windows are more packing paper and tape than glass at this point. When Andy finally admits that they’ll have to draw water from the well to clean off, Nile calls it. She takes one of the middle beds, resolutely ignoring the layer of grime and blood on her skin and the poke of straw on the back of her arms and shuts her eyes until she tricks herself into sleeping.

Unexpectedly, she greets the sunrise wrapped in a warm embrace. She’s not on her side, never is when there’s the space to sleep corpse-straight across her bed. But still, there’s a leg over both of hers and two clasped hands familiarly rested in the space just below her ribcage. When she tries to move Quynh burrows closer in her koala pose, flexes her fingers and hauls Andy in tighter to Nile as well. Andy seems to genuinely be sleeping behind Quynh, though she’s curled herself up in a loose protective ball with her knees resting in the small of Quynh’s back. Booker is out of sight but audible behind Andy, his snores damp but regular.

There’s an empty knot of blankets to her right instead of Nicky and Joe. Nile moves by inches, scooting herself to the left instead of trying to sit up directly. She lands ass-first on the floor, but the jolt is worth it when all Quynh does is hum unhappily and shift to lay on her belly in Nile’s abandoned spot.

Joe, Nicky, and their daemons are stretched out on the grass in front of the shack-cottage-home. The men are propped up back to back, unimpeded views in either direction, with Miriam curled on Nicky’s lap and Zipphora stretched between Joe’s sprawled legs. They look as tired as she still feels, and she can tell how unsettled they are by the flip in their behavior. Joe is stone still, even his breath invisible from her distance, and Nicky is worrying his hand over Miriam’s ears, half rubbing and half drumming his fingertips.

Nile eases back on her heel to retreat, leave them to their quiet moment. Nicky turns his head to glance at her, pulls out his small private smile. “Good morning. Would you like to join us?”

She rubs her chest, right over the empty-and-refilled spot where Chris lives, and pads down the steps to join them. She sits at right angles to them, leans herself back to rest against their shoulders and upper arms so that between them they’re covering every approach to the front of the house. Chris takes a few experimental hops like he might try flying, but settles carefully in the cradle of her crossed legs instead.

“We were just discussing how prepared we feel for this century to end,” Nicky says conversationally. Nile isn’t sure if he’s consciously taken on the nihilistic humour she associates with her own generation, but it’s one of the very few ways Nicky fits seamlessly with current culture.

“Total shitshow,” she agrees. “Globally and personally.”

“I keep telling him no, the seventeenth century was worse,” Joe says. He’s aiming for the same tone as Nicky, but his voice pitches lower and more gravelly like he can’t quite keep up with the game. “Plague, all those wars, the revolutions at the end of the Ming dynasty, the little ice age…”

“Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin,” Nile counters immediately, “global warming, natural disasters, new pandemics, financial crises. And that’s not even started on the fact that you guys taught me about immortality on the fly while being kidnapped by a sadistic, money mad pharma CEO.”

Nicky snorts his laughter and Joe concedes the point with an incline of his head she feels settle against the back of her skull. “Truly, there have been much better centuries.”

“Kinda thought this last one was it for me,” she says hesitantly. She knows they’ll always listen, but she’d also seen the surprising ways they’d dissolved in that base. This isn’t like discussing dreams, it’s something that she’s sharing with them.

“Me too,” Nicky says in Italian. One of his hands reaches out and rests palm up. She takes the invitation and rests her palm against his. “Sharing these two has been such a gift for us for so long, and we—“

“We’re sorry we let you down,” Joe says very quietly. Unlike Nicky, he hasn’t reached out. All Nile has to go on is his tone and the tight clench of his shoulder against her back.

She twists to face him, but he’s looking resolutely away as if there’s anything but more grass on the horizon. It’s an awkward angle, but she still punches him hard in the arm. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He sighs out the kind of old-man noise she’d expect from Booker. “You pulled us out of there by the ear, Nile. I don’t know if we would have kept going.”

“Maybe not,” Nicky admits, even more quietly.

“That’s complete bullshit,” Nile retorts confidently. “Don’t make me hit you again, man. When was the last time something new and surprisingly shitty happened to you?”

They’re both silent, though Nicky squeezes her hand rapid and tight.

“That’s right. I, on the other hand, am constantly exposed to new shit. I never expected to be electrocuted while trying to disarm the bomb of an alt-right terrorist group in the Maldives. That shit is not even TV ready. But I got through it and I kept going because I know how to keep walking, and I know you guys would be there to hold me up when it got too hard. So even though I literally can’t think of anything worse than what happened to us, I kept going so that you could too.”

She turns and rises onto her knees, leaves the wide open space at her back vulnerable so she can look at them. “Andy told me we got each other’s backs. And we did, so now is not the time for you to slip into some—uncharacteristic macho bullshit.”

Joe doesn’t look particularly macho, nose red and tears sliding unimpeded down into his beard. He gives her one of those smiles, not proud because it doesn’t have a hint of superiority but just happy to be with her. She wraps one arm tight around him and gets the other around Nicky’s chest and lets herself cling to them.

“I thought that moment was it, too,” Nicky says finally, not releasing the grip he has over her arm, keeping her slightly uncomfortable on her knees with all her weight braced on them through her upper body. “Or, I didn’t even think. It wasn’t even that it hurt, it’s that in that moment I felt that I had taken them for granted and lost her as a punishment. I never considered that I could exist without any daemon at all, even when we saw the intercised children.”

“Mediocre scientists, making everyone’s life worse. Why do scientists these days never learn what gravity is, or discover the function of the pancreas, or something worth reading about,” Joe grumbles wetly. He turns to curl into Nile, gets his forehead braced against the curve of her neck. Nile kisses the top of his head firmly. “I didn’t even know it was wrong, at first. Miriam was there and so I thought of course they were safe.”

“We can just add it to our list of shitty things that real life villains do,” Nile says. “It doesn’t say anything about us. And hopefully no one ever does it to anyone, ever again.”

Nicky shifts further into her too, and then gently collapses both her and Joe back so that she’s laying partially on top of them, only the height of their bodies stopping her from being face down in the dirt. With his newly-freed arm, he rubs her back gently. She relaxes into the touch despite the increasing precariousness of her position.

“I think it will be a while before I lose the urge to remind you how happy I am to know you, Nile,” Nicky says. This time it’s Joe who hums his agreement. Nile pushes herself up again and rolls over him, crowding him on one side as Nicky scoots in on the other until he and Joe are touching from shoulders to ankles and she’s rested her head on the surprisingly comfortable space just to the right of Joe’s collarbone.

“You guys aren’t so bad,” she agrees. It draws a laugh out of Joe, startled and loud. Cuddling from the top is much more comfortable, even though it had been nice to feel the physical proof of Quynh’s trust and affection. Plus, this way she can see across Joe to the way Nicky relaxes out of his hyperawareness, head tilted just enough that he can keep close watch on Joe instead of any potential threats.

“All three of you are both great and useless,” Booker announces from the doorway. “I thought the first one up had to make breakfast, not have emotional conversations in a dogpile.”

Joe raises the hand tucked under Nile enough that he can flip Booker off without looking back at him. Nicky raises a head. “Breakfast?”

“I made you assholes pancakes,” Booker agrees.

They scramble up to their feet, but before they start back inside Nile leans into another hug with Joe, wrapping both arms tight around his waist. Nicky folds himself in behind her, arm extending along hers so that he’s enveloping both of them. Neither expects it when she heaves upwards, lifts Joe onto his toes to shake and sway with him.

“We love you too,” Nicky says into her hair, and then he moves past her. He’s already criticizing the cut of the pancake toppings before he’s reached Booker, reeling the Frenchman in for a side hug and gesturing wildly with his free hand to prove a point. Nile leans back enough to smile at Joe, feels warmed to the tips of her toes by his immediate and energetic response. He gives her a gentle shove towards the house and Nile knows that this, too, is something they’re going to get through.

Andy is obviously trying to give them all, and Nile in particular, time to recover. There haven’t been any surprise training exercises or obscure quizzes or even any particularly intense stories about past misadventures. Nile has to seek her out instead, tracks Party to a patch of high grass identical to all those around it and finds Andy sprawled next to him. She’s squinting in irritation at a notebook and doesn’t look up as Nile sinks down crosslegged next to her.

“You’re missing full-contact Old Maid,” Nile offers to break the silence. Andy’s face is smooth and untroubled when she looks up at her.

“I’ve recused myself to level the playing field,” Andy counters. She passes over the notebook when Nile holds a hand out. From her first glance at the contents, Joe was the original owner of this one. She hasn’t become immune to the beauty of his sketches yet and thinks she might even be able to pick out his work at a museum soon. This one has less pleasant content than the reams of paper he’s dedicated to preserving scenes of their family together.

Her own face, unfamiliar in a new twist of grief, merges into a bare-bones sketch that is obviously the daemons napping in a heap. A pattern around the edge evokes the snow-camo from their mission, and there’s a series of lines that evoke Andy’s labrys in motion. Below them, rendered meticulously, is a floorplan of the spaces Nicky, Joe, and Nile had progressed through in the compound. The door, the awful dark door where everything had went wrong, is drawn so heavily that there’s a thin line where Joe has worn through the paper.

“Andy,” she says quietly. She’s not sure if the ache is an echo of those horrible hours, or sympathy for Andy’s solitary penitence.

“We’ve never had that happen.” Andy takes the book back and closes it decisively. “I’m much happier letting Nicky chalk things up to destiny when it’s not--”

Nile leans into her side, sinking boneless so they’re pressed close. Andy shifts, moves her arm enough that she can squeeze Nile’s knee tight. They sit quietly for long enough that Nile realizes the angle of the sun has changed, and then Andy sighs with a weariness that Nile recognizes from pre-Quynh times.

“Something about that door,” she says. “Not just that shitty things happen around it, that door meant something.”

“Describe it to me,” Andy says with the patience of a woman who has outlasted civilizations without even trying. Nile focuses on the steadying sensation of Andy’s hand on her leg and faces the memories, lets herself talk just as much about the horrible feelings as the shape of the rooms and the pattern of their progress.

She feels hollowed out when she’s done, but she’s pressed so close to Andy that there’s nowhere further to slump. Andy takes her gently, steers her down so her head is cradled in Andy’s lap. When Andy rests a hand on her forehead, not moving and barely pressing, Nile feels tears prick at her eyes and thinks of her mom instead of the lost feeling she’d had without Christopher.

“When they tried intercision on Quynh, there was nothing distinct about the architecture of the building,” Andy says, choosing each word carefully. “They had cages to keep the humans and daemons separate. You said that the girl you saved was just tied down?”

Nile nods numbly but can’t bring herself to speak again. Andy squints at the horizon like she’s measuring up an opponent. “The whole wing was an intercision chamber. They were preparing to increase the speed of their mutilations by limiting the structures necessary.”

Nile thinks hard, forces herself to confront a moment which is currently well in first for “worst experience of her life” when she’d looked at Christopher and known that she might never see him again. “When we were taken, the metal was some kind of alloy, it was gold. This looked like a normal cage, just smaller so that the daemon couldn’t change into a shape that could slip out.”

Andy nods, smiles down at her bright and bitter. “All they’d need is a blade, once they got someone into the room.”

Nile has never hated the tide of progress so much. These faceless men hadn’t even admitted what they were doing to the world, hadn’t followed any kind of ethical or scientific form of declaration or rules. Yet, still, they wanted to simplify and automate the torture, like taking the time to destroy one child at a time was inadequate.

“Then he couldn’t have fixed it,” she says, remembering the man and his guinea pig daemon and their promise to reverse the process when he’d seen them daemonless. “He didn’t know we’re immortal.”

“Fucker,” Andy agrees absently. “The entire wing must act as some kind of buffer between humans and daemons. She twists to look up at Party, who does some inexplicable horse version of a squint.

“Come to think of it,” he says, “there was a weird moment while you were gone. I may have assumed it was heartburn. Definitely heart adjacent. It was gone before you got back, and it seemed like there were bigger problems.”

Andy groans and punches him gently just above his nearest hoof. He leans down to lip at her hair, leaving behind an excellent impression of a mad scientist. She hugs his neck too, smoothes down his fetlocks.

“So they were always going to come back, too,” Nile says aloud. She needs to get the words out, release the pressure and fear that’s lingering. She doesn’t have to worry every time they’re in a fight that she’ll lose Christopher again. “We died and it reset the connection.”

“I, for one, vote that all missions are outside from now on,” Chris says primly, startling Nile. She’d thought he was sleeping but when she shifts to look he’s got his eyes fixed on her. He tilts his head, hops twice to indicate he’s prepared a statement that he thinks will be funny. “Ceilings are stupid.”

Nile groans and Andy laughs, tousles the feathers on Chris’ head. It does feel good, a rippling echo of warm comfort across Nile’s own scalp. She resettles so that the meat of one of Andy’s ridiculous thigh muscles pillows her neck, breathes in deeply, and lets the last of the tension evaporate in the sun.

Her good mood lasts, but Nile can’t say the same for the weather. It rains, and Nile is unsurprised when it drenches them all in their shoddy bedroom.

“This is a metaphor,” Booker says glumly as he wrings out his shirt.

“This is the reason that I should get to vet safehouses,” Quynh counters. She’s pulled her hair up into an elegant twist and stolen one of Nicky’s hoodies as insurance against the cold, wet breeze that comes through cracks in the walls. Thuy Tinh has claimed the actual hood, flat head peeking out over Nile’s shoulder but the coils lost in the soft fuzz of the inner lining.

“We’ve seen worse than this,” Andy says, completely unapologetically. “Besides, I think I built this place so you know at least it’s solid.”

Nile would not want to pay anyone to press on a loadbearing wall. Instead, she goes for, “I can’t believe you’re unsure if you built the house that is trying against all hope to kill us.”

Andy pulls her in for something that starts as a hug and ends with using Nile as a shield against a particularly large drip of water. “We’ve been slacking on your lessons, anyway. Kids these days just don’t know how to thatch a roof.”

She and Nicky actually do haul Nile onto the roof the next week, when they pronounce the grass dry enough to redo the roof. Despite the lack of cocktails or beach chairs, Joe and Quynh seem determined to do their best impression of Real Housewives watching the new poolboy at work. Nile doesn’t feel objectified personally, but she’s also never seen Nicky remove his shirt so slowly when Joe wasn’t in view. Andy, who tends more towards competence than strip teases, seems to be lifting more hay than necessary. Nile will not play these games.

“You look like a hearty serf preparing for winter,” Chris chirps. With Nile up high enough that they don’t have any stretch in their bond, she feels safe enough letting him further than arm’s reach. She feels a little guilty about how she’s been holding him back, but the tight circles Chris is performing over her head are evidence that he’s also not ready to figure out how far they can push things since his return.

“I feel like a damn fool,” she says. He squawks out a laugh, pulls free one piece of hay from the bundle she’s trying to secure and dances himself around it like he’s tangoing with a rose. She leans herself back and grins, shakes her head fondly.

The next month’s task is re-daubing the walls. Joe tells her, in gleefully cheerful detail, how lucky she is to avoid using animal shit like they did “in the old days.” His lack of specificity leads Nile to believe that Joe never actually performed medieval home repair. He’s completely good natured about the work, going where Nicky or Andy points and mixing new batches of daub without breaking a sweat, but he also has a gift for getting more mud on himself than the walls.

“Babe, I think maybe you should just give in to your spa day,” Nicky says at last. He has his hands on his hips, surveying the mud that Joe has managed to cake into the laugh lines of his face, swipe across Zipphora’s forehead like Simba, and coat Nile’s cheeks like a legitimate mud mask. “Why don’t you go sit down.”

Joe winks at Nile and doesn’t protest, sprawling back down on the grass. Andy and Nicky don’t stop her from sitting next to him, so she smears the mud up to her forehead and down across her chin and stretches out next to him to dry.

“Has Nicky always been the handy one?”

“I resemble that statement,” Joe drawls and folds his hands behind his head. “My love is capable, hardy, and talented. You know, he forged a sword for me once? Very erotic. I can do nothing in the face of his brilliance but watch and enjoy.”

“First, ew,” she says.

Booker, who has also managed to avoid the home restoration project by pretending not to hear anyone call his name while reading a thick book, snorts. “I’ve heard stories of their early days. Joe whined incessantly about building camps.”

“I was from a city! I was unaccustomed to—roughing it.”

Nile snickers. “Yeah, I can see you more as a glamper than a rambler.”

“I learned some things,” Joe adds primly. “Like that if Andromache was going to whine about the quality of a tent fabric, it was best for her to hunt, skin, and stitch it herself. I take care of decorations.”

“And silky smooth skin,” Booker mutters. Joe swipes a finger across his own face and reaches out, unerring despite his closed eyes, to drag the muck from the bridge of Booker’s nose to his chin.

The faint sounds of a vehicle in the distance startle them all into silence. Nile doesn’t bother to clean off her face when she rushes for the house, hauling open the trunk of guns at the same time as Joe starts hauling the edged weapons off their precarious wall struts. He underhands the longsword to Nicky as Nile distributes semis and takes a position at the semi-intentional hole in the front wall which represents a window. Andy elbows her gently when she joins her, leaned out of sight against the wall while Nile has crouched down below the sill.

She recognizes the silhouette of Catley before she identifies Copley. The daemon is perched on the dashboard of a surprisingly rattley old car, radiating her familiar disdain as she rides out the bumps in the road. Nile stands but doesn’t put down the gun until Copley has parked next to their van, letting Copley loose in the long grass and taking out a small leather bag.

Booker is the first one out of the house, completely unarmed. “Mr. Copley.”

“Mr. Booker.”

Nile notices that they both hesitate, arms slightly out from their bodies, before Andy catches up. “This is a surprise,” she says. She doesn’t sound like it’s a particularly good surprise, but then everyone but Nile seems determined to keep Copley at arm’s length.

“Andy,” he says, straightens his shoulders a little. “I tried to message you, but apparently you’ve chosen a black hole for all cellular service and I decided that I would have a better chance of arriving than any mail shipment.”

“You have to share a bed with Booker if you’re staying,” Quynh says smugly. “And you better have brought us a gift, Copley.”

He reaches into his bag and pulls out a bottle of Palm Bay Ocean Peach Pomelo. Quynh smirks and gestures him inside, liberating him of the drink as he goes past. Copley takes in the room, and Nile shares the moment to briefly compare Andy’s mud den with the sleek modernist lines of Copley’s private library.

“It’s very,” he says and trails off, British politeness overcome. “Also, I’m afraid some of you have—“

Andy and Nicky are muddy up to their elbows and Nile abruptly remembers Joe’s impromptu facials. It seems that Booker has the same reaction but worse, because he grabs the free end of his unbuttoned shirt and scrubs hard at his face. Joe looks completely unapologetic, drying mud cracking around his smile.

Andy looks at each of them slowly before returning her gaze to Copley. “I hope you brought us more than room temperature vodka beverages.”

He nods and starts digging through his bag again, spreads a series of print newspapers and glossy photos over the table. Catley swaggers in and hops onto the middle of the table, obscuring one of the headlines but leaving visible the unattractive shot of the guinea pig daemon and Nile’s nightmare man in handcuffs. Booker steps up next to her, slides a magazine around and grunts thoughtfully.

“I thought you might be interested to know the results of your mission,” Copley says. He folds his arms and steps back, Catley rolls lazily onto her back in the middle of the table and then stretches widely in several directions.

“It worked,” Nile sighs in relief. Across the room, Nicky has moved in to get an arm tight around Joe’s waist, their daemons twined into an inseparable collage at their feet. Quynh punches Andy’s arm in excitement, then draws her in and dips her dramatically low for a kiss. Nile turns to Booker for a hug and realizes that he’s watching Copley intently, one hand pressed over his mouth. She hugs him anyways, and he barely jumps before he gets his arms around her.

“I hope there’s more of your garbage drink in the trunk,” Andy says, but she’s red-lipped and smiling with her whole body.

Nicky and Joe prepare dinner while Andy and Copley unload a spectacular range of liquor, including a bottle of no-name vodka that Nile suspects would bleach her hair white and four bottles of Booker’s preferred scotch. Nile sits at the table, paging slowly through the accumulated evidence. Chris launches himself up to be on the table too, talons flattened so that he can hops himself along the table and peck pointedly at the awful man’s face a few times.

“I wasn’t sure we could do it,” Nile admits quietly to him. Catley cracks an eye open to squint at her judgingly and then rolls luxuriously to face the other direction and give them privacy.

“I knew we could,” Chris says cheerfully. Nile clucks him under the chin gently and he stirs up enough of the papers to form the basis of a nest. “It’s pretty obvious that we can do anything.”

“Ego,” she reminds him and he preens himself aggressively. Nile plants her hands on the table, one palm balanced on a stack of documents that Copley definitely should not have legally been able to acquire which detail an American investigation into the collated victim list, the other pressed hard into a technical drawing of the incision machine, and drops her head. She holds the position, balanced on the edge of fear and hope, until Quynh pointedly sweeps the table clean and puts a large pot of curry in the centre instead.

The storm breaks and Nile sinks into the seat and laughs, feels the relief work through her body and unkink muscles she’s stopped even thinking about at the front of her neck and the outside of her ankles and curved protectively around her stomach. No one acknowledges or stops her as she flirts with hysteria and settles on incredulous delight, but when she settles and wipes her eyes there’s a large glass of wine and a full plate in front of her.

“That’s going to be a hard one to follow up,” she says when she’s demolished a plate and a half.

“I’m happy to stick with some low hanging fruit for a while,” Booker grumbles. He still has a spot of mud on his nose despite an obvious effort to clean himself off. “A few less international conspiracies for a decade or two.”

“We’ll have to lay low anyway,” Andy says, leaning her chair back to balance on its back legs. “I don’t envy you, Copley, keeping this one down.”

“It seems that most of the victims are happy to continue the shrouding of their heroes’ identities,” Copley says mildly. He seems to be drinking Andy’s rotgut, which is a pretty big surprise and an indication of how worn down he is. It is possible, Nile thinks, that he hasn’t realized what he’s poured himself and someone is going to have to wrangle him in twenty minutes. “And the hard evidence against our villains brings many of their defenses into question, particularly a team of attractive humans who rise from the dead and are mysteriously absent from the video feeds.”

“Aw, Copley, you think we’re attractive?” Joe drawls and leans his own chair back. Nicky, both elbows on the table, rolls his eyes fondly and stays silent.

Nile can recognize the flush on Copley’s face, the rapid side look he takes at Booker before focusing intently on the rice on his plate. He clears his throat twice, loudly, before he forces out, “It’s an objective assessment.”

Nile looks between him and Booker. Then, powered by the speed of a good buzz, she jerks down under the table and sees Catley draped over Baudelaire’s back, purring audibly and neatly making biscuits in the space between the fox daemon’s shoulder blades. The world swings when she lurches back upright, exchanges a look that she intends to be very pointed at Joe.

“So how long,” Andy says dryly. She raises her glass in a toast and knocks the whole thing back, swings an arm to pull Quynh in closer. “And, are congratulations in order?”

Booker mutters and curses in a dialect that’s several steps off of being recognizably French. He shifts his chair an inch closer to Copley but doesn’t reach out to touch them. Nile coughs loudly.

“Do you call him Copley too?” Joe asks incredulously, slamming himself back down so his chair is on all four legs. “When do you even have _time_ to have a secret romance? Booker!”

“I knew,” Quynh says smugly. Nile isn’t sure if Quynh is lying or smug, the two faces are very similar even without the haze of alcohol. “And I heard Booker call him _James_ once.”

“Your daemon doesn’t even call you James! I don’t call you James!” Joe’s voice isn’t teasing any more, he looks like a kid who’s learned their math exam has been snowed out.

“This is why I didn’t tell them,” Booker says flatly, but his eyes flash warmly when he looks at Copley. Copley, _James_ , reaches out and pats Booker’s hand before returning to his own space.

“I suppose the good thing about your team is that there’s hardly an organizational structure which would indicate it’s a conflict of interest to date a colleague,” Copley says dryly.

From under the table, Catley says, “I can _cat_ egorically confirm—“ and is cut off with a whoosh of air like she’s been jumped on. Nile snickers, and then laughs again, wraps an arm around Booker as he smiles bashfully into his glass.

Some bleary time between a desert of British chocolate and stumbling face first back into bed, Nile resurfaces from her happy haze to the sounds of a well worn argument. Quynh is doing impressions of historical figures she claims Andy has slept with, most of which involve pitching her voice lower and saying things like “I’m Caesar, I like to fight pirates but I don’t understand the meaning of friendship” and “I have a very square face and am obsessed with writing poetry, but you can just call me Kublai.”

“At least I didn’t stab the great khan on his wedding night,” Andy retorts at last. She and Quynh look at each other and then crack up, falling into each other and shaking with laughter.

Copley, looking like he’s just personally found a new religion to worship, says, “You murdered Genghis Khan? No one can ever confirm how he died, these days.”

“I murdered a lot of people!” Quynh retorts, wrapping both arms around Andy’s neck and pressing their cheeks together. “But yes, it is possible that I got him drunk and stabbed him to death on our wedding night.”

“He really should have asked if you were already married,” Andy agrees. Her own arms settle low and familiar in the small of Quynh’s back.

“Please don’t pull out the timeline of famous people Andy has fucked, James,” Booker says tiredly. He squints over his glass at Copley, who is now trying very hard to pretend like he doesn’t indeed have an annotated list of Andy’s conquests. “Let’s hear about anyone else’s traumatic love life.”

Joe starts to lean forward and is hauled back by Nicky, who is sandwiched with his back propped against Zipphora and Miriam. He covers Joe’s mouth with a hand and gives Nile a desperate look. “Please, Nile, tell us a story of romance that does not involve untimely death or my own ass.”

Nile looks at her hands and shrugs. “I had a boyfriend in high school. He wasn’t—Okay, it’s possible he thought he was a sex god.” She pauses for their laughter and smiles a bit. “Just before I shipped out, he said he’d learned a new trick that was guaranteed to satisfy me. Missionary style, but he.” She thinks hard of how to describe it, and settles for shimmying her hips back and forth. “Moved that way instead of in and out?”

Andy cries with laughter, wiping her eyes helplessly. “And?

“It would have been better if he said he’d learned a trick I’d never forget,” Nile finishes dryly.

Joe has obviously worked himself free from Nicky’s halfhearted restraints, because he’s also laughing clearly. He pauses, pointedly looks at each of them in their loose circle, and then stretches his arm back to cup a hand around the back of Nicky’s neck. “Everyone in this house but me has the worst taste in men.”

Quynh reaches out and she and Joe blindly high five, the smack as loud as a gunshot. Nicky hums disapprovingly but Joe interrupts his protest with a firm, slow kiss. Booker takes up the slack and announces, “You’re right, I’ve always thought it was surprising that Nicky completely lacks in taste.”

Copley stays for a week, claiming vocally that it’s so that he can gain their consent on the work he’s done since they went dark and plan any next steps. In reality, he and Booker have started going for walks. Joe calls them “business walks” with an inordinate amount of leering, but if Copley and Booker are having quickies out of view of the house, they’re also actually capable of rebuttoning their clothes properly before returning. They don’t have a fraction of the comfortable togetherness Nile sees in Joe and Nicky, but they also seem awkwardly happy around each other which goes a long way in earning her approval.

Nile decides to trust the newly enforced structure of the house and takes to climbing onto the roof. She’s stretched out, watching Chris spiral carefully further away without actually testing either of their strength, when Andy’s head pops over the gutter. Nile pats the spot next to her but doesn’t otherwise move as Andy scrambles over and stretches herself out prone.

“You’ve done a good job,” Andy says firmly.

Nile smiles faintly. “Thanks. Andy, I don’t need a report card. I know you guys would tell me if there was something I needed to change.”

“This isn’t about that.” Andy crosses her hands loosely over her chest and Nile lets the silence rest as the other woman thinks about what to say. “I’ve always been the leader. Even when all I wanted to do was die—first when Quynh left, then just before I met you when it felt like the whole world and every moment of my life in it was shit. Even when all I wanted to do was sit and wait for something to happen to me, I knew that the guys would look to me before they made choices of their own.

“They trust you. I fucking trust you, kid, even if you have a lot to learn.”

“Andy,” Nile says more quietly. She sits up to fold her arms carefully over her bent knees, bracing herself forward.

“We were going to tell you before I croaked,” Andy continues, still choosing her words carefully. “I knew they would never trust Booker even if that asshole had the motivation to lead a charge, and no team can have two leaders. When I was gone, you were going to lead them. I was comfortable with it.”

“But you’re not dying, Andy,” Nile says firmly. She’s not sure why she instinctively feels the need to be reassuring, even aggressive in her tone. She squeezes her hands into fists, scared to look down at Andy.

“No. But things have still changed.” Andy shifts to reflect her pose, but every line where Nile feels wire-tight, Andy looks loose and comfortable. “I lost hope in a lot of things. That the world could be better. That I’d get Quynh back. And now, for the first time in a really fucking long time I want new things. I’m not asking you to be the new me. I’m asking that sometimes, you be the first one in the room.”

Nile exhales hard. “Quynh? Joe and Nicky have a lot more experience—“

“Quynh barely likes to work in a team, let alone lead one,” Andy says levelly. “And you dragged Nicky and Joe through that compound with your own force of will. When I saw them, I thought that it might even be their time, but you kept them moving and kept them safe. You’ll never find two guys better at supporting you, but I want you to be it.”

“To take my own missions,” Nile murmurs.

“Not all of them,” Andy repeats. She bumps her shoulder gently against Nile’s. “And I’ll still be around, playing the peanut gallery and helping out where you need me. I just spend a lot of time thinking about how I’d like to study Quynh’s face instead of blueprints and armour specs.”

“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said,” Nile says because there’s a lump in her throat that’s preventing her from matching Andy’s emotional vulnerability. She glances sideways and sees that Andy is looking at her, seeing her fully, with that surprised and delighted smile from their first fight and all the little moments Nile has stepped up without realizing that someone else might not.

“I trust you. You’re going to be great,” Andy replies. She raises an arm and Nile sinks into her side, sighs in relief. Over their heads, Chris catches an updraft and spirals gleefully higher towards the sky.

\--

Nile looks around at the team. Her team, officially. Quynh is playing at being distracted, knitting intently on the couch and forcing Booker to hold her yarn. Andy is flat on the floor with a large mixing bowl full of Cheese Puffs on her chest. She gives Nile an encouraging smile and pops three into her mouth at once. Party, powdered-orange up nearly to his eyes, lips the next handful away before Andy can eat it. Catley has lay on top of Copley’s speaker again, because there’s the low gears-grinding sound of purring in the background of the room.

Nile goes to stand at the table and Nicky and Joe rise to meet her, mirroring each other as they lean in from opposite sides to study the papers she’s arranged in front of her. And again, like so many times, Nile is hit with how much she loves each of these incredibly old weirdos.

She pulls in a deep, steadying breath and rubs her thumb quickly over Chris’ talons on her shoulder. “So, how much do you know about the exotic animal trade?”

They go to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nile Freeman - Christopher, golden eagle  
> Andromache the Scythian - Party Horse, known officially as Partitavus the horse.  
> Booker - Baudelaire (red fox)  
> Joe & Nicky - Zipphora (lioness) and Miriam (wolf)  
> Copley - unnamed cat, aka Catley.  
> Quynh - Thủy Tinh (king cobra)


End file.
